Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
A reader emailed me recently to say he disagreed with my position on an issue. That’s fine, I get such emails all the time, and I typically respond to them. I’ve had some good discussions that way.
The funny thing about this one, however, is that the reader never walked me through the substance of his counterargument. Instead, he told me he usually liked my stuff because it is pretty logical, but in his judgment this particular piece was not. He didn’t say what was illogical about it
He implied that he would stop reading my work if I persisted in these unspecified illogicalities. I think he intended that as a threat.
Then he implied that my position was not only illogical for unspecified reasons, but was aligned with the other tribe. The thrust was that the other tribe is always wrong, and so if I happen to agree with them on a given issue, that makes me wrong as well. In addition to being traitorous.
I think he intended that, too, as a threat. As in, “If you persist in being a traitor, I’ll stop reading you.”
I got to thinking. This reader is exactly the sort of person who should read me. By reading me, he occasionally gets exposed to a position outside his comfort zone, expressed by someone he has enough regard for to take the time to read regularly.
However, he evidently is not interested in being taken outside his comfort zone. He likes his comfort zone just fine. It’s comfortable, in fact. What he wants is validation of his comfortable comfort zone.
He’s not alone. In today’s political polarization, he’s the rule, not the exception.
Bloggers like me – and even many legacy news sources – have learned to pander to these millions of polarized partisans. They publish what they know the partisans want to hear. They seldom stray off the reservation, lest they lose a reader, and a click, and a dollar.
As for me, I don’t need readers or clicks or dollars. I’m not in this for money (thank goodness). There are no stakeholders or shareholders in my operation. Unlike the Washington Post, there’s no chance I’ll lay off a third of my staff tomorrow. When you have no staff, you have no staff to lose.
I truly do this because I’m a political junkie, because I enjoy writing, and because I like to interact with my readers. If you don’t like what I say, or even if you do, please free to let me know in an email or, preferably, a public comment.
I’m happy to interact in a substantive and sometimes personal way. I’ve made friends in my writing, though in some cases we still haven’t met. (You know who you are.) And I’m talking about real friends – the kind where we can disagree without being disagreeable.
On the other hand, if reading something with which you disagree is intolerable to you – if you insist that everything you read be tribal orthodoxy – there are plenty of other blogger-whores out there happy to pander to you.
They’ll say what you want to hear, every single time. They’ll please and pleasure you, orgasmically, and even pretend to have a simultaneous one with you – so long as you keep clicking.
After factoring in births, the state’s overall population increased less than half a percent. That’s the lowest since the oil and gas bust of 1989 nearly a half century ago.
These figures put Colorado in the bottom half of population growth. We’re 29th of the 50 states. Neighboring Utah grew at the fifth-highest rate, so Colorado can’t blame it on the demise of the carbon-spewing, environment-wrecking, injury-causing, traffic-jamming ski industry which is mired in a record snow drought.
Colorado used to be cool. It was young, vibrant, virile. Colorado often led the nation in the youth and fitness of its residents.
It was the state to move to. Hardly anyone was born here. Even I wasn’t, though I’ve lived 90% of my life here. If you said you were born here, you were either a cowboy or a liar. (Nobody is both.)
Like a lot of low-density farming and ranching states, Colorado was a red state before “red state” was coined. Then it was a purple state for a brief transition in the late 20th century. Now it’s a deep blue state.
Colorado has not had a Republican governor for 19 years. The next one won’t be, either. The state legislature is overwhelmingly far-left Democrat, and routinely passes full-blown whack-job legislation that even the Democrat governor opposes.
All seven of the state Supreme Court Justices are Democrat appointees (who became a laughing stock after the real Supreme Court issued a 9-0 smack-down of their disqualification of Donald Trump from the 2024 state ballot).
Colorado College, once a gem of a liberal arts college, has fallen to a ranking of 370 in the latest Wall Street Journal college rankings, which puts it somewhere between Howard (that’s spelled with a “ow” not a “arv”) and the University of Alabama.
Alumni donations to the school are down as well. Perhaps all this has something to do with the fact that CC’s obsession with DEI (call it CC-DEI) drove them over a cliff into abandoning the SAT.
That’s right, today’s CC students get admitted not with test scores, but with skin color. The SAT was an inconvenient obstacle to that.
Needless to say, most sizeable Colorado cities including Denver (ruled by Democrat mayors for the last 73 years), Boulder, Fort Collins, Longmont, Lakewood, Durango and Greeley are “sanctuary cities” where local law enforcement is prohibited from cooperating with federal officials enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.
So how did Colorado go from paradise to parasite?
It’s not because the politics of the people changed. Rather, it’s because the people themselves changed. Back when Colorado was a hip place to move to, the hipsters moved here in droves. Hipsters, in case you haven’t noticed, tend to be Democrats.
Legalizing pot in Colorado also helped. In case you haven’t noticed, heavy pot smokers tend to be Democrats, as well.
Swarms of Democrats fled the hell of Democrat-controlled California. Utterly devoid of any perception of cause-and-effect (notwithstanding their preaching about “science”), they bring with them the Democrat policies that caused the hellish effect that they fled in California to inflict on the heavenly refuge of Colorado.
It’s the same everywhere. Californians flee their self-made hell but ignorantly bring with them the policies that created it. That pattern continues for a while, until the hellish policies of the newcomers turn their new heavenly refuge into a hell of its own. The next thing you know, people are fleeing that heaven-turned-hell, too.
Even then, Democrats remain incapable or unwilling to connect the dots between the hellish policies they enact in the statehouse and the living hell they produce on the ground.
And so, they flee to another new heaven – maybe Montana, maybe Idaho, maybe Utah. Naturally, they again take the same hellish policies that caused them to flee Colorado and, before that, caused them to flee California.
I wish these people who faithfully chant “I believe in science” would learn about cause and effect.
Both are a little north of one million. Of those, around 400,000 are deaths. (For the Ukrainians, both are a little lower, so far.)
Most observers thought the Russians would overrun Kyiv in weeks. But they’ve now been at war in Ukraine longer – four years – than America was at war in WWII. And there’s no end in sight. Recent Russian advances are measured not in kilometers, but meters.
Russian troop morale is as bad as you would expect. Nobody goes to Eastern Europe for outdoor winter camping where your tentmate sleeping next to you sometimes gets blown to bits.
The toll on the Russian economy has been brutal. GDP is flat or contracting. Apart from oil, Russia is incapable of producing anything the world wants.
After finally deciding communism wasn’t according to Russia’s needs (apologies to Karl Marx), they replaced it with fascism – the real kind, not the kind that loony Democrats accuse Republicans of. Communism is gone, but the atheistic, alcoholic corruption it taught to Russian society over the course of 70 years remains.
Russia can’t even export terror anymore. They ignored their ally Venezuela last month, left Iran and Syria high and dry last summer, and bid adios to Cuba a generation ago.
The Soviet Union had “client states” that did its bidding. Now, Russia itself is a client state, of China.
Russia does still have a nuclear arsenal. But so do other third-rate nations, including Pakistan (thanks, Bill Clinton!) and North Korea (thanks, W!). In any event, Russian military ineptitude in Ukraine leaves me wondering whether they could launch a nuke past their own borders or might instead accidentally drop it on St. Petersburg.
Strategically, the war has been even worse, if that’s possible. It drove Finland and Sweden into NATO. It finally awakened Western Europe to the danger of the Russian bear, even if it’s largely toothless now, and prompted them to increase defense expenditures – doubling them in some cases.
The distance between Berlin and Kyiv is 750 miles, after all, which is less than the distance between Denver and Chicago.
And then there’s those pesky casualties. Vladimir Putin probably doesn’t care about the deaths and injuries to his soldiers, other than in the sense that each casualty reduces his fighting force and therefore reduces the potency of his military (which he might eventually need for the purpose of keeping his own people subdued).
But the war has to be a little embarrassing for him. This is a former KGB spook who likes to be photographed shirtless on horseback. His macho motif is disrupted by dismembered soldiers and wailing mothers.
So, what will happen? Ukrainian equipment will continue to be better than Russian equipment so long as NATO supplies it. Russian troops seem no better than Ukrainian troops, and a lot less motivated.
In sheer numbers of troops, however, Russia has the advantage. They have a near-endless supply of hapless, helpless, atheistic, alcoholic youngsters, some of them convicts, to use as drone fodder.
But it could take years for that numerical advantage to play out. This war might not even be half over. The war could outlast Putin.
Meanwhile, Russia is not a player in the rest of the world. That much is good.
You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all wanna change the world – John Lennon/Paul McCartney
Three-quarters of a million people were killed in the American Civil War, and another half million were wounded – many grievously.
That was in a country with a population of less than a tenth of today’s America. The equivalent deaths in today’s America would be about eight million. That’s something like 20x the American deaths in WWII.
Much of Atlanta was burned to the ground in the Civil War, as were large sections of Charleston, Vicksburg and Richmond.
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a southern sympathizer near the end of the war, five days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the main Confederate army.
The end of the war did not end the anger and hate. The country was divided for generations. I remember growing up in the 60s – in Colorado of all places – and kids would still tease one another about being “Rebels” or “Yankees” a century after the Civil War.
In the south, Blacks were freed from slavery but the defeated separatists subjected them to a new yoke of Jim Crow laws preventing them from voting, obtaining equal educations, living where they wanted, and loving whom they wished.
The Civil War was the most violent and destructive thing that ever happened to America.
Some people want another one.
On both the left and the right, many people are full of anger and hate for the “other side.” That much, I get. I’m pretty angry myself, and I confess to some hatred for the other side on occasion.
The silo’ed news sources on the internet contribute to this. Many people don’t look at news sources other than the ones that say what they want to hear – namely, that the other side is stupid, evil and perhaps subhuman. And hooray for our side!
That’s natural. People believe what they want to believe, and eventually they cherish those beliefs. They watch “news” that tells them their cherished beliefs are right, and that they are right to cherish them.
The news sources themselves are partly to blame. Generations of bias, then sheer incompetence, and now click-baiting, have produced a media industry that often lacks honesty and credibility.
The end result is that anger and hate own some of us. Some of us want not only to beat the other side at the ballot box, and not only to beat the other side in the courts of law, and not only to beat the other side in the court of public opinion. They want to beat the other side literally. They want to kill, dismember and maim the other side.
They want another civil war.
Here’s my advice to those people. Your anger and hate will not produce a beneficial outcome for America.
Moreover, your anger and hate will not produce a beneficial outcome for you.
Look within. Anger and hate are not generated by the objects of your anger and hate; anger and hate come from inside you. And they are consuming you.
But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out.
Alex Pretti did something foolish and illegal at the protest in Minneapolis. He interfered with law enforcement agents. There will be debates for days if not years about whether his illegal interference with the cops, the discovery of his gun, and his violent resistance justified them shooting him.
In considering that issue, I urge readers to consider it not from the warm comfort of their recliner while watching slow-motion videotapes interspersed with football highlights, but from the perspective of cops who are being taunted, spat upon, name-called, and threatened with being run over by organized protesters in the bitter cold, who suddenly discover in a scuffle that one of those protesters has a gun hidden in his pants.
(I’m glad to report that speculation that the gun was planted on Pretti by the cops appears to be disproven.)
But let’s put to one side the issue of whether the shooting was justified. Even now, we still don’t have enough facts to make that determination.
Let’s instead consider a threshold issue: Why did Pretti bring a gun?
Note that it’s not illegal in America for ordinary citizens to own a gun. And it’s not illegal to protest non-violently.
It’s not even illegal to bring a gun to a protest (despite claims to the contrary by a Trump Administration official).
In short, whatever illegalities Alex Pretti committed at the protest, he did nothing illegal in putting a gun in his pants and going there.
But why did he? Why did he hide a loaded gun in his pants?
Ordinary people carry guns routinely for lots of reasons. Most of those reasons are poor ones, in my judgment, but not illegal ones. Some ordinary people carry guns simply because it makes them feel secure or even masculine. Some ordinary people carry guns because it plays into boyish fantasies.
And a few ordinary people carry guns because they have legitimate reasons to think they may need them for lawful self-defense and they have the expert skill and excellent judgment to use them properly in that mode.
Pretti seems not to be in the latter category. Rather, he brought a gun to the protest because it made him feel secure or masculine or fulfilled boyish fantasies. Sadly, those feelings and fantasies cost him his life.
Before leaving this incident, there’s a tribal juxtaposition here that is worth noting. Conservatives typically defend and even celebrate owning and carrying a gun, while liberals typically decry the same. Conversely, liberals typically defend and even celebrate protests of law enforcement, while conservatives typically decry the same.
So, conservative and liberal tribalists are left in a quandary when somebody brings a gun to a protest of the immigration laws. Conservatives wonder, do we defend the gun-toter even if he’s protesting? Liberals wonder, do we defend the protester even if he totes a gun?
I like the fact that this quandary forces the tribes to think past tribal identities. Conservatives are forced to acknowledge that owning and carrying a gun may be lawful but there are circumstances where it isn’t smart or right. Liberals are forced to acknowledge that protesting may be lawful but there are circumstances where that, too, isn’t smart or right.
In short, judging an act often requires thought beyond merely identifying the tribe of the person performing that act. A bit more thought and a bit less tribalism would be helpful these days.
President Trump did some good things toward peace last year, for which I’ve congratulated him.
Among other things, he derailed the Iranian quest for nuclear weapons with which to make good their never-ending promise to destroy what they call the “Little Satan” of Israel and then the “Big Satan” of America.
He also supported Israel in its effort to contain Hamas and other Islamic terror groups. Israel’s efforts entailed some pain and suffering, but it was the only option to prevent another massacre like October 7, a massacre that Hamas explicitly vowed to repeat.
More recently, he decapitated a narco-klepto-regime in our own hemisphere, Venezuela, that had gotten very cozy with the outlaw states of the world and inflicted horrible misery on its own people.
But the Nobel Peace Prize Committee chose to give their prize to someone else. They have their reasons. One possible reason, which they will never admit to, is that they hate Jews, hate Israel, and hate anyone who helps the Jews of Israel secure their ongoing existence. So, Trump’s efforts to help achieve peace in the Middle East may have actually hurt his chances for the Peace Prize.
In any event, the Prize Committee has explained that the cutoff for “good deeds” considered in Committee determinations was long before Trump’s Middle East triumph. That seems fair enough. Deadlines are deadlines.
As for Venezuela, the actions by Trump to remove the dictator came not just after the cutoff, but after the Prize had already been awarded.
The person who won the Prize was the opposition leader of Venezuela who has literally risked her life for her people for years.
Before the Prize was awarded, she thanked Trump for his support. After the Prize was awarded, and after the dictator had been removed, she was effusive in her thanks to Trump.
In fact, in a visit to the White House last week, she offered the prize to Trump. He accepted it. The physical Prize in now in his possession.
However, the Nobel Committee has declared that transferring physical possession of the Prize does not accomplish a transfer of the Prize itself. The winner is and will always be the Venezuelan opposition leader to whom it was awarded.
It’s a little like an Olympic gold medal. If physical possession of a medal is transferred from the medal winner to someone else, by gift, sale, theft, accident or otherwise, the medalist is still the person who won it, not the transferee.
All this did not sit well with the President. He openly campaigned for the Prize. After it was awarded to someone else, he said again that it was he who deserved it. When he was offered a gift of it by the winner, he accepted the gift and now proudly displays it as if he actually won it.
That was all awkward enough. Over the weekend came the Peace Prize coup de grace.
Trump has been agitating to take possession of Greenland. That’s not as crazy as it sounds but, as always, Trump has pursued this latest prize ham-handedly. He’s even made noises about a military invasion.
The current owner of Greenland is Denmark. They’ve held the place for roughly a thousand years – since long before Columbus sailed. The Danes are not happy with Trump’s invasion threat. Nor is the rest of Europe.
As a general matter, I have little geopolitical sympathy for the Danes or for the rest of Europe. They’ve been freeloading off America’s defense for three generations. And all the while, they impugn us with a moral and cultural smugness that is hard to bear.
The Greenland matter will get worked out. As usual in Trump spats with foreign powers, it will involve some gain for America (probably not outright possession of Greenland, however). Whether that long-term gain will be worth the short-term (hopefully) alienation of allies is something history will judge.
Meanwhile, we have negotiations by public tweets and non-confidential texts. In a text over the weekend, Trump told the Norwegian Prime Minister:
“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”
This is weird on several levels. First, there is the petulance of a sore loser. That needs no elaboration.
Second, the President seems to be suggesting a substantive change in America’s priorities and policy simply because he personally did not win the Peace Prize derby. He suggests that before losing, he had been thinking “purely of peace” but he “can now think about what is good and proper for the United States.”
Wait a minute! He’s been preaching “America First” for years. Now, we find out it’s America First only since last fall when he lost out on the Peace Prize. If he’s awarded the next Peace Prize (fat chance!), will we be back to something other than America First?
Finally, there’s the irony of it all. The President seems to be willing – nay, he seems to be begging – to be manipulated: “Give me the Peace Prize, or I’ll wage war on Greenland!” Is that an effective pitch for a Peace Prize?
Maybe I’m missing something. But if this is “the art of the deal,” then someone is not playing with a full deck.
David Brooks holds himself out as a moderate Republican. I suspect, however, that the last Republican he voted for was George H.W. Bush – the senior Bush who was elected 38 years ago.
Disgracefully but predictably, PBS pairs Brooks with Jonathan Capehart in a point-counterpoint format. PBS pretends that this little tête-à-tête constitutes balance – an avowed far-left gay Black man versus a faux Republican moderate who, in reality, hasn’t voted for a Republican in decades.
But Brooks made a good point in a recent piece on the shooting in Minneapolis. First, Capehart performed his predictable over-the-top song and dance about murder-murder-MURDER!!!
Then Brooks quietly observed that, in a better day, principled people would believe what they see on videotape. Today, however, it’s the opposite. Rather than believing what they see, people are seeing what they believe.
People watching exactly the same videotape believe they watched a murder, or believe they watched a cop shoot someone in self-defense, based on their pre-existing political persuasion.
Today’s political partisans are like sports fans. When two people are watching the same game but rooting for opposite teams, they typically both believe their team is getting cheated by the refs.
Of course, that can’t be true. On balance, the refs are either fair, or biased one way, or biased the other way. But people’s emotions cloud their judgment. It’s especially pernicious that they’re unaware of this phenomenon. That’s bad enough in sports; it’s tragic and often unjust in law enforcement.
Of course, after making this good point, Brooks went on to bash President Trump. There’s a reason, after all, that Brooks has a forum at PBS and The New York Times.
As of today, a few more facts have come it. I don’t know what Brooks is thinking right now, but I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.
First, a couple of background facts. Context matters.
The cop (I’ll call him a “cop” for convenience, though I know he’s not a policeman, and I do so without derogation) was the victim of another car incident last year. His arm got tangled up inside the car of a person he was apprehending as the person drove off. The cop was dragged 300 feet down the paved road by the accelerating car. He was lucky to survive.
Does that matter? Maybe not in a legal sense. After all, it was a completely different incident that occurred many months ago. But it suggests that the man was probably sensitive to the danger in such a circumstance. I sure would be.
Here’s another background fact. The left has made a studied show of resistance to enforcement of the immigration laws. They’ve flung names at ICE cops such as Nazis, fascists and worse. They’ve physically obstructed them, and occasionally physically attacked them with rocks and bottles. That’s criminal behavior, even though it does not justify a lethal response.
They’ve also used their cars to obstruct the cops and, as I’ve just reported above, on at least one occasion they dragged a cop 300 feet with their car.
Their objective has been to provoke the cops into victimizing them. Lefty influencers have explicitly urged protesters to put their bodies on the line.
If they can provoke the cops into violence in their enforcement of the immigration laws, goes the thinking on the left, people will come to believe that the laws being enforced are bad.
It’s a very old strategy. It often works, especially when the news media is sympathetic to the cause.
A final background fact. The Administration has taken a confrontational approach to immigration enforcement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it may be warranted in view of the lackadaisical approach taken for many years. But confrontational approaches do have a tendency to produce, well, confrontations.
Whatever approach is utilized, it might be useful to combine it with an employee card-check system where employers are required to check the immigration status of their employees. Substantial fines could be imposed on companies who hire illegals. Such a system has been talked about for years and partially utilized, but politicians too often bow to business lobbies who want to hire illegals for cheap labor.
The bystander’s video is taken from a stationary position. It shows a cop approaching the car, putting his hand on the driver’s door handle, and ordering her:
“Get the fuck out of the car.”
The car moves backward a few inches. The front wheels turn hard right and it juts forward. Only then, you can see another cop at the left front of the car. He shoots three times. We later learn that his shots leave one bullet hole through the windshield. At least one shot went in through the driver’s open side window as the car moved past him.
The shot through the driver’s side window suggests that, whatever danger the cop was in at the time he shot through the windshield, the cop by then had gotten out of the way, for he was then alongside the car.
The video taken by the cop’s body cam provides more context as the cop circles the car. The woman’s wife was at the scene and had gotten out of the car. Smirking, the wife taunted the cop repeatedly:
“Come at us! You want to come at us?”
A refection of the cop is visible in the shiny finish of the car, and he appears to be a sizable man. The wife taunts him again:
“Go get yourself some lunch, big boy!”
As the cop circles to the front of the car, the shots come quite suddenly. The situation was tense but exploded unexpectedly, to me as the viewer anyway, with (1) the wife starting to open the passenger side door and shouting “drive, baby, drive,” (2) the car lurching forward, and (3) three shots ringing out quickly.
I cannot tell whether the cop legitimately feared for his life when he fired the first shot. I can say, however, that he was very ready to pull his gun and shoot, because he did so very fast. As for the second and third shots, see my discussion above.
It’s still early, and not all the facts are in. Maybe they never will be.
But here’s my tentative assessment. Two lefty troublemakers went looking for trouble. They used their car to block armed cops on an icy street from doing their jobs, and they taunted the cops with personal insults. One cop reacted with a profanity. Another cop – who’d been dragged 300 feet by a car in such a situation – reacted with his gun when the car lurched toward him as he was circling it and he heard “Drive, baby, drive!”
Is this tragic? Yes. Was it preventable? Yes. Is it murder? No.
We don’t need to invade Greenland. We can instead buy the Greenlanders. Here’s my scheme.
First, let’s review what’s at stake. Greenland is the size of Texas. It’s strategically positioned in the North Atlantic. It extends almost to the North Pole (a spot that is on ocean ice north of Greenland).
We already have an air base in Greenland above the Arctic Circle which serves to provide early warning of incoming Russian missiles and bombers. And we also have our own bombers and missiles stationed there.
Greenland is rich in natural resources, including petroleum, fish, fresh water, gold, lithium and rare earth metals.
The population of Greenland is only about 57,000 people, 3,000 polar bears and 50,000 seals. The largest town holds only 18,000 people – smaller than the enrollment of a typical liberal arts college.
Denmark claims to “own” Greenland because it was settled by a few hundred Vikings – you know, pirates – thousands of years after it was settled by Native Americans. Greenland is technically a Danish colony today. In today’s world, however, that doesn’t give the Danes a claim to it. If anything, it makes the Danes “colonizers” and gives Greenlanders a claim against Denmark for reparations.
At some point, Greenland will be absorbed by one of today’s superpowers. It’s just too good and too vulnerable to pass up. Denmark is not in a position geographically, militarily or economically to resist a takeover. As for Greenland’s own military, well, there isn’t one.
The official language of Greenland is Eskimo. It’s not officially called that, however. (In fact, Eskimos aren’t officially called Eskimos anymore, either. They’re now called Inuit. Don’t ask why. That would be racist. But it has to do with raw meat.) The official language is officially called Kalaallisut. But most inhabitants and nearly all educated ones also speak English.
Given that 88% of the island claims to be Inuit, their loyalty to Denmark – the colonizers – is doubtful.
Of course, the U.S. could conquer Greenland with the Nantucket Police Force in a weekend. But there’s a better way.
Offer the Greenlanders money. Say, about a million dollars per man, woman and child. Since there are only 57,000 inhabitants, the total bill would come to only $57 billion.
That’s chump change. It’s less than 1% of the U.S. annual federal budget. It’s less than 4% of the outstanding student loan debt in America. It’s about what Somali immigrants defraud us out of in a couple of years.
I can see it now. We’ll annex Greenland. The Greenlanders will be thrilled and wealthy. We’ll build Trump Towers all along the coast, legalize gambling, and recoup from the inhabitants our $57 billion in a matter of months.
Democrat historians outnumber Republican historians by somewhere between 8 to 1 and 19 to 1. The disparity is even worse than those ratios suggest, since many of the Democrat historians are not just Democrats, but hard-left ones, while virtually none of the few Republican historians are hard-right.
There’s a name for hard-left historians. They’re called “tenured professors” and we pay their salaries and give them summers off. There’s also a name for hard-right historians. They’re called “Uber drivers” and we pay their salaries, too, but they don’t get their summers off.
It’s no surprise that historians have not looked at Donald Trump in a historical context. They’re too busy simply bashing him as a “threat to democracy” along with whatever epithet du jour is dished out by the pseudo-academic establishment in concert with the Democratic National Committee.
Admittedly, there are still one or two Republican historians in existence. Not all are Uber drivers. But they, too, have not done much to contextualize Donald Trump. They’re instead simply doing the polar opposite of what the army of leftist historians are doing. They’re cheerleading the Trump Presidency. You know who you are.
When a person is a history professor on the left, or less often on the right, maybe the lure of public grants and private clicks is just too strong to actually profess some history.
In any event, since the historians on both sides are busy practicing politics, your undersigned political junky will practice a little history. Someone has to.
Let’s start small. We could compare Trump to FDR, who bullied the Supreme Court into approving his welfare state even though it plainly ran afoul of the Constitution. He succeeded by threatening to expand the number of Supreme Court Justices to whatever number was necessary and packing it with his toadies.
Or we could compare Trump to the other Roosevelt – the one known as Teddy – because Teddy was a Rough Rider and, well, Trump is a rough rider.
Or we could compare Trump and his Greenlandic hegemony with Jefferson who doubled the size of the young nation by purchasing the Louisiana Territory without Congressional authorization.
Let’s go back a bit further.
Alexander the Great was the son of a Macedonian king who was publicly assassinated when Alexander was only 20. There’s disagreement about whether Alexander was behind the plot but, in view of his subsequent brutality and ambition, there’s no disagreement that such a plot was certainly within his character.
Alexander took the throne and immediately conquered much of the known world at a tender age when much of today’s youth is still on their parents’ health care insurance. He subjugated Athens. He put Persia out of business for about 2,400 years (until Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump had to perform another smack-down last summer).
He founded a city on the coast of Egypt that became one of the great cities of the age. He had the unmitigated self-centeredness to name it after himself, Alexandria. The towering lighthouse he commissioned for the Alexandria coast was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and stood for a thousand years.
Alexander himself stood for fewer than 33 years and was in power for only 12. But which do people remember, Alexander or the lighthouse?
(Since we’re on the topic of namesake cities, I can imagine TrumpopolisTM as a city. Send royalty checks for that name, Mr. President, to TheAspenBeat.)
Historians who are still practicing history say Alexander was a thug. He burned down Persepolis, the great Persian city in present-day Iran. He enslaved hundreds of thousands. He was gay (as were many ancient Greeks on occasion) but evidently not happy.
Alexander’s empire didn’t last, but the Greek civilization did. He was a despot, not a democrat, but his worldwide influence permanently chiseled Greek culture into the Roman and Judaic worlds, and ultimately into our own. Alexander wasn’t good, but he was certainly great.
On to another despot, Julius Caesar. Forget about Greenland, this guy invaded France. Then he went home and declared himself dictator. Desperate times call for desperate measures which call for desperate men.
It didn’t end well for Caesar, but it did end well for Rome. The ensuing empire ruled the known world for the next 500 years, establishing the “Pax Romana” that was the most peaceful time in ancient history.
We’ve named things after Julius Caesar – a casino, a surgical procedure, a month in the calendar, and a salad. No battleships, yet.
Then there was Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsican seized power in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution where a succession of bloodthirsty mobs had made ritual machine-beheading into a spectator sport. It was something like being canceled, but more so.
Napoleon’s reach exceeded his grasp, especially in the Russian winter where half his army was frozen, starved or shot.
For that, Letitia James or some such person got Napoleon exiled. He came back for one last, brief round of glory, but met his Waterloo in 1815. He was then exiled again, and died on a remote island in the South Atlantic.
Like Alexander and Caesar before him, Napoleon wasn’t good but he was great.
America shows some parallels to the waning days of ancient Greece, the deteriorating Republic of Rome preceding the grandeur of the Empire, and post-Revolution France.
By some objective measures, our best days are behind us. National debt is far higher than ever before. Student achievement has plummeted.
A large portion of the population embraces socialism. Experiments over the years have proven socialism to be destructive and divisive, but the adherents are blissfully ignorant of those experiments, as are their teachers.
The basic competence of America’s governing elite is abysmal. Immigrants are allowed to defraud the people out of billions on the grounds that it would be racist to stop them. Trillions were spent on virtue-signaling in the guise of climate-change abatement.
For decades, the border was wide open – the government was even sending airplanes to pick up migrants for the express purpose of illegally plopping them into the country. They get commercial drivers’ licenses, welfare, college scholarships and voting rights, no questions asked.
Public discourse has deteriorated to yard signs, cable TV shouting matches, and internet drive-by commentary.
The democratic republic established by our Founders is nor equipped for this mob rule any better than post-monarchy France was.
Enter Donald Trump. He is not a good man and never will be, but he may prove to be a great man. As in the case of other historical figures, consider his timing, circumstances and luck – and sheer audacity.
What that greatness might mean for America will be revealed by history. But probably not by historians.
Note to Readers: This is the final installment of a three-part series. Part One is HERE and Part Two is HERE. I call this final installment “Choose Your Destructor.”
Part One of this series discussed the rise of Western Civilization from the Greeks and Romans. Part Two concluded with the sad realization that this Western Civilization is falling. The question for this final Part Three is, what will replace it?
It won’t be Russia, “a gas station masquerading as a country,” as John McCain famously put it. McCain died before he could witness Russia proving him right by flailing and failing to conquer it’s eastern neighbor for nearly four years now, a conquering that any competent conqueror could have performed in four weeks.
Of course, by “eastern neighbor,” I’m not talking about the NATO alliance, or even Finland or Sweden. I’m talking about . . . drum roll . . . Ukraine. That’s right. Russia cannot even take over a country most people had never heard of before Russia made heroes of them, and still couldn’t place on a map even if the map were limited to Eastern Europe.
That leaves two powerful forces as candidates for the Destructor of Western Civilization – the nation of China and the imperialist religion of Islam.
China is an ancient civilization going back to the time of the pharaohs. They built their civilization the old-fashioned way — by hard work, merit and an inquisitive culture, much as the Greeks and Romans later built theirs.
The ancient Chinese differed from the Greeks and Romans in an important way, due to geography. The Chinese weren’t located on the friendly pond of the Mediterranean Sea, but rather on the shores of the vast and ferocious Pacific Ocean, and so they never developed an advanced seafaring technology. That limited their ability to expand, since the land to the immediate west of them was high and dry. Eventually, they traded with the West over the Silk Road, but that came late and entailed an arduous journey.
As a result, Chinese culture has always been insular. Until the 20th century, they didn’t give a fig about the West. They were quite sure their system and their people were superior to whatever the West had to offer.
They still often think that way, though now they see that the West – or at least America – does have some things to offer. Such as advanced AI microchips.
With or without the West, Chinese culture is successful by most measures, as one would expect of a bright and numerous people utilizing merit-based approaches to management.
To be sure, communism has corrupted Chinese culture, as it corrupts all cultures it infects. But Chinese communism is a little different. It’s not just an extreme form of socialism. They don’t practice “from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.” Karl Marx was not Chinese.
The communism practiced by the Chinese is more like a state-regulated capitalism. Small businesses flourish independently in a free market economy. Large ones are often controlled or even owned by the government, but with the goal of maximizing wealth, not redistributing it. Foreign investment in China is encouraged. They emphasize manufacturing and exporting manufactured goods, something no communist country ever achieved during the Cold War.
The political system, too, is pragmatic in a way seldom seen in Marxist communism. People join the Party, they advance by showing ability and alliances, and the most-accomplished become part of an oligarchy or “politburo,” which chooses leaders.
The leaders they choose these days are not dictators in the sense of having absolute power. There’s always the oligarchy/politburo to deal with.
This should sound familiar. The Founders of the United States of America were an oligarchy. They were not elected. Rather, they knew and respected one another and built alliances among themselves to arrive at most decisions by consensus.
Oligarchies are not so bad. I sometimes wish we were now being ruled by the oligarchy of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Monroe, Franklin, Adams and the other Founders, rather than by warring mobs, conspiracy theorists and a lying media.
Chinese culture is generally not imperial. That’s in part due to their geographical isolation and consequent wariness of outsiders and in part, relatedly, because they always thought their culture was too good to share. Whatever the reasons, they don’t have a tradition of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors. The Chinese could own most of Russia and all of Southeast Asia, at a minimum, but they don’t. (Yes, I know about their designs on Tibet and Taiwan.)
Nor are the Chinese a theocracy or regime of ideologues. They’re a pragmatic and patient people. The billion-plus of them will eventually dominate the world, but probably not by brute force. (Yes, I know about the brutality of Tiananmen Square.)
Their strategy in trade is an example. Their days of slave labor and child labor are largely over. With vast numbers of skilled workers, they manufacture huge quantities of goods at high efficiency and sell them at a small margin. The manufacturing skills and trading networks they’re developing will serve them over the long term.
It’s the long term they’re interested in. The Chinese were a civilization in the time of the Egyptians, and well before the Greeks and Romans.
Our assimilation by the Chinese will probably be gradual and not destructive. They’re not interested in killing their customers. They think of Americans the way we think of cattle – big and clumsy, but very useful once you domesticate them.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the Chinese are nice people. They will exploit us, and they already are. Like cattle, we will be milked.
But we won’t be slaughtered.
There are things China admires about us, such as our inventiveness, our technological sophistication, and even our entrepreneurialism (despite or perhaps because of the fact that they themselves are, putatively, anti-capitalist communists).
With any luck, the Greco-Roman-Western culture that still dominates the world but is falling fast will not be extinguished, but will instead live on and be subsumed by China. Who knows, they might even improve on it, just as the Romans improved on the Greeks in some ways and we improved on them both in some ways.
They might even boot the Muslims out of Europe – something that European leaders lack the backbone to do even as the European people demand it.
Which brings us to the other possible group that could be our Destructor. It’s that old nemesis of the Greeks – the Persians. Or, more broadly, the Muslims. Of course, the ancient Persians were not Muslims, since Muhammad was still a millennium in the future, but there’s a straight line between the culture of Persia and the culture of Islam.
I will state some hard truths about the Muslims. Rather than grappling with those hard truths, some will simply dismiss the message by labelling me as the messenger “Islamophobic.”
If “Islamophobic” means fearing people who glorify the beheading of babies, the torturing of hostages, the defenestration of gays, and the raping of women, then I plead guilty. I am indeed Islamophobic.
One of those hard truths about the Muslims is that they have a nasty habit of conquering and converting infidels at the point of the sword – the ones they don’t kill outright, that is. To that end, they’ve invaded Europe multiple times, the most recent being the “mostly peaceful” invasion of the last generation.
They’re like strangers who crashed a house party. The kind hosts reluctantly let them stay. Then they repaid the hosts’ kindness by trashing their house. Now, the hosts are afraid to ask them to leave. Next, they’ll be sleeping in the hosts’ bed, with his wife along with the young girls they brought.
It won’t continue to be mostly peaceful. The party crashers see the hosts as infidels. They contend the hosts have no rightful authority over this house. They must submit and convert and then submit some more, and some more, or be put to death.
In fairness to Muslims, two qualifications should be mentioned. First, violence can be found not only in Muslim writings but also in Judeo-Christian writings. But violence in old Judeo-Christian texts is mostly ignored or viewed as allegorical now. When’s the last time you heard a Christian talk about literal jihad? Or globalizing an intifada? No mainstream Christian theologian preaches that we should invade Saudi Arabia and kill or convert them.
Many mainstream Muslim theologians, on the other hand, do preach that they should invade Europe and America, kill or convert us, and steal our stuff. Their leaders publicly label us Satanic. The great cathedrals of Europe will be converted into Muslim mosques in the next 50 years. Bet on it.
The second qualification is, not all Muslims believe in violence. In fact, the great majority of them do not. But – and this is a big but – when someone commits an atrocity in the name of his religion, others of that religion are obligated to condemn the atrocity and disown the criminal who committed it. Muslims seldom do.
I realize I’m asking for more from good Muslims than I’ve ever asked of myself. I’m asking them to risk everything by standing against religious atrocities, while all I’ve ever risked is losing a few tribal readers by standing against stupid tweets.
But if you don’t stand up to wrongs committed in the name of your religion or tribe, then you forfeit that religion or tribe to the wrong. So far, most Muslims have elected not to bravely stand up to wrongs committed in the name of their religion. They’ve elected to risk their religion rather than risk themselves.
It’s ironic that, once you scratch the surface, this religion cloaked in machismo seems to be 10% barbarians and 90% chickens.
Back to those plodding Chinese. The difference between Chinese and Muslim culture can be seen in a microcosm in their respective immigrants to America. Which do you prefer?
I prefer the Chinese. Given the choice, I choose to be assimilated by pragmatic, exploitative, profit-seeking Chinese rather than being conquered and converted, or worse, by violent, macho, chicken-shit Muslims.
I wish I didn’t have to choose – I wish there were still reason for optimism about the West – but there’s not. Being assimilated into China is our only hope for some semblance of our culture to survive.
the Aspen beat 