Yup, The Substitute Standard Bearer Is Roger Kimball

On Tuesday, I noted that with Victor Davis Hanson out of action while he recovers from a serious operation, Instapundit and Real Clear Politics have had to fall back on Roger Kimball, although I demonstrated in that post that it's perfectly possible to generate a recognizable VDH piece using AI, and nobody would see the difference. But today, both Instapundit (here) and Real Clear Politics (here) have linked to the same Roger Kimball essay.

I wouid go so far as to say that Kimball fully recognizes the import of this move. Not only is he subbing for VDH, but he goes several steps beyond: he lifts a phrase from the great Rush Limnbaugh's show opener without attribution: "All across the fruited plain, the self-denominated paragons of virtue. . ." Limbaugh's show opener for many years was, "Greetings to you, music lovers, thrill-seekers, and conversationalists all across the fruited plain."

As far as I can tell, Kimball is sending the message that not only is he stepping in for VDH, he's now assuming the mantle of El Rushbo himself. But let's take a look at what the great man has to say.

[R]emember how the New York Times greeted the news of the fall of the Shah and the advent of Khomenei’s Shia insanity? Writing in our fish-wrap of record, Richard Falk said the Khomenei represented “Islam’s finest hour” and “a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics.” “Iran,” he concluded, “may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane government for a third-world country.” How has that story aged? Compare these images of pre- and post-Islamic societies.

. . . Meanwhile, where is Donald Trump? It’s been widely reported that the US has moved massive assets, including six B-2 bombers and a number of aerial tankers, to within striking distance of Iran. When the action comes it will, I predict, be devastating for that horrible, life-denying form of religious perversion. . . . Patience is hard to maintain while hundreds of innocent civilians are being mowed down nightly. But patience is necessary. The worst thing would be to emulate Jimmy Carter and botch the operation. I looked up the word “half-cocked”: “only partly ready; poorly prepared: half-cocked solutions often change things for the worse.” Keep it in mind.

But Kimball is late -- as of Wednesday, it appears that Trump has changed course:

Wednesday afternoon, President Trump made an astounding about-face from his previous stern warnings to the Iranian regime, contending that he had been told by unnamed sources that “the killing in Iran is stopped,” and “it’s just one of those things.”

Apparently Kimball wasn't up to date on this by the time The Spectator posted it Thursday morning -- its admonition to be patient while we wait for the B-2 strikes is likely to require heroic virtue as his readers continue to wait and wait and wait. But OK, let's grant that there was some sort of glitch, and Kimball already had another set of reactions in the pipeline, but the editors posted an earlier take in error. Have we seen any attempt to recalibrate since then, from Kimball or anyone else? A much better analysis was puiblished a week ago, on January 9, at The Daily Economy, but it mentions neither Trump nor Iran:

In 2016, near the conclusion of his second term, President Barack Obama was asked by Chris Wallace about his greatest mistake as president. Obama didn’t hesitate to respond. He said his “worst mistake” was “probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

Five years earlier, a coalition of NATO members, led by France, Britain, and the United States, intervened in the Libyan civil war and overthrew the government of Muammar Gaddafi. This resulted in Gaddafi’s death and the transformation of Libya into a failed state, a condition that persists thirteen years later, which has resulted in an ongoing civil war, countless deaths of civilians, and a humanitarian and refugee crisis. The US-led intervention in Libya was strategically misguided and ultimately harmful, providing a cautionary example for future US foreign policy. It would have been a better option for the United States to have done nothing than to trigger such a calamitous descent into chaos.

It's becoming plain that Trump has had similar concerns:

President Donald Trump seemed to remain ambivalent about the possibility of exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi taking over the country if the Islamic regime were to fall.

"He seems very nice, but I don't know how he'd play within his own country," Trump told Reuters during an interview on Wednesday. "And we really aren't up to that point yet.

"I don't know whether or not his country would accept his leadership, and certainly if they would, that would be fine with me," he added.

Trump has yet to take a clear stance on Pahlavi since protests erupted in Iran late last month. On Jan. 8, during an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Trump said that he was unsure about meeting with Pahlavi amid the unrest in Iran, saying it might not be "appropriate."

"I've watched him, and he seems like a nice person, but I’m not sure that it would be appropriate at this point to do that as president," Trump said. "I think that we should let everybody go out there, and we see who emerges."

This echoes what appears to have been his approach in Venezuela:

U.S. officials had already settled on an acceptable candidate to replace Mr. Maduro, at least for the time being: Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who had impressed Trump officials with her management of Venezuela’s crucial oil industry.

The people involved in the discussions said intermediaries persuaded the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments in the country.

“I’ve been watching her career for a long time, so I have some sense of who she is and what she’s about,” said one senior U.S. official, referring to Ms. Rodríguez.

. . . [T]he Trump administration has chosen to give Mr. Maduro’s vice president a chance and to pass over [María Corina Machado], who won the Nobel Prize and had at least some allies in Mr. Trump’s circle.

. . . It would be “very tough” for Ms. Machado to take control of her country, Mr. Trump said, adding in his televised speech that she was a “very nice woman” but “doesn’t have the support” in Venezuela to lead.

In other words, it looks like Trump has taken Obama's lesson from Libya to heart as he looks to replace dictatorships. The thing to be said about the mullahs in Iran is that they appear to be able to maintain some semblance of order, which would include maintaining the basics of civilization like water and electricity, when removing them entirely would simply make things worse. If they can manage not to massacre the demonstrators, it's an interim least-bad solution. He's also looking for signs in both Venezuela and Iran that any replacement regime has a chance of success -- Reza Pahlavi and Machado have good press, but little subsance behind it.

So far, we aren't hearing anything like even this from Roger Kimball. On the other hand, having AI generate continued columns that look like they were written by Victor Davis Hanson is a strategy that will demonstrably work. But I know from long experience that Glenn Reynolds won't take my suggestions. I won't even try with Sean Trende.

Did Scott Adams "Convert To Christianity"?

🚨NEW: @ScottAdamsSays announces he’ll convert to Christianity in his final days🙏✝️@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/1uprnQJDxa

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) January 4, 2026

I think the reaction to Scott Adams's announcement on his January 4 podcast that he'd "convert to Christianity" in his final days is obtuse at best. Even EWTN seems to have it wrong:

Adams’ post quickly went viral, drawing over 37 million views and sparking an outpouring of prayer and reflection.

Elon Musk reposted Adams’ statement with the caption:

“Respect. No one leaves this life undefeated, but leaving it with faith is victory.”

Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey wrote,

“The most important thing he ever wrote.”

And evangelist Franklin Graham shared Adams’ message with a touching reminder:

“It’s never too late to turn to Jesus.”

Though known for his sharp wit and cultural commentary, Scott Adams’ last public act wasn’t satire—it was surrender. His decision to call on Jesus before drawing his final breath shows that God’s grace often finds us in unexpected moments.

As someone who adhered to conventional Christian principles, raised Presbyterian, converted to Episcopalian and then Roman Catholic, for much of my life, the one thing that neither Adams nor anyone else mentions is baptism. Back in the day, it was generally thought that if you converted to Christianity as an adult, you got baptized, although if you'd been baptized as an infant but had fallen away, it was still valid; you're returning to the faith, not converting to it. Adams doesn't mention baptism at all, which strikes me as a problem.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "Do organized Christian denominations generally treat baptism as the authentic sign of conversion?" (I'm discovering that in many areas, AI is as effective and easier to access than a good reference librarian.) In this case, it answered,

Organized Christian denominations vary significantly in how they treat baptism in relation to conversion. While almost all major traditions view it as a foundational initiation rite, they differ on whether it is the means of conversion or merely a sign of it.

Sacramental (Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican): These traditions view baptism as a sacrament that effectively regenerates the person. In these cases, especially with infant baptism, the ritual itself is seen as the entry into the Christian life and the means by which original sin is cleansed, rather than just a sign of a prior conversion.

Credobaptist (Baptist, Pentecostal, Evangelical): These groups view baptism as an ordinance and an "outward sign of an inward change". In this view, baptism is the authentic sign that a conscious, personal conversion has already occurred through faith alone.

Symbolic/Spiritual (Quakers, Salvation Army): Some organized groups do not practice water baptism at all, viewing "baptism in the Spirit" as the only essential spiritual reality of conversion.

While Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Orthodox, and Lutherans are more explicit about requiring a period of catechesis before baptism, Chrome AI mode told me,

[M]ost mainline Protestant denominations typically require or strongly recommend that adult initiates undergo a period of instruction or "catechesis" before baptism. While specific practices vary by congregation, the general goal is to ensure the candidate understands the theological significance of the rite and the commitments they are making.

The resulting profession of faith usually includes a statement of adherence to one of the two major creeds. Adams, in his Januatry 1 statement, says only this:

Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:

I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him.

Adams seems to think that saying these particular words will get him into heaven, and if this happens, his "Christian" friends will be right. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Would either a Roman Catholic or main line protestant pastor say it is enough just to say 'I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior' to go to heaven?" Oddly, it didn't answer directly, and it simply gave me a list of unhelpful links. In fact, further searching suggests nobody is willing to give a direct answet to that question, so we might almost say Adams is going to test it experimentally. If he wakes up in heaven, he'll know. I say good luck with that.

The closest historical parallel is the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was baptized on his deathbed in the apparent belief that the sacrament would leave him in a state of grace, while his enfeebled condition and his limited remaining time in this world would assure that he wouldn't be able to sin and deny himself entry into heaven. Again, my answer would be good luck with that -- but at least he saw the necessity of baptism. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't consider him to be a saint, which is another way of saying that it can't vouch that he went to heaven, in part due to the deathbed baptism issue. John Nolte, who writes for alt media Breitbart News, recognized the problem more specifically from a Catholic point of view:

I do hope that Adams will add baptism, last rites, and confession to his conversion. My beliefs say those are vital, and there’s no downside to crossing those Ts and dotting those Is.

But as we've seen above, under normal circumstances, no responsible Catholic or protestant pastor will baptize anyone without some type of catechesis lasting a period of months. In cases of impendiing battle, disaster, or other danger of death, in Catholicism, even a layman can perform the sacrament. The problem for Adams is that he announced his terminal diagnosis back in May, when he had plenty of time to prepare. A Baptist theologian goes into more depth over this:

To some, the prospect of anyone converting to Christianity (even at an unspecified future date) should be celebrated. Scripture declares that the angels rejoice in heaven over each sinner who repents (Luke 15:10). But even though only God can judge a person’s heart, much of what Adams shared in his public proclamation is at odds with biblical truth.

Adams’s position is essentially a rendering of the famous philosophical argument known as “Pascal’s Wager,” which was developed by French theologian and apologist Blaise Pascal. The crux of the argument is that you have more to gain and less to lose by “wagering” on God’s existence. In short, it is better to live as though God exists and then discover he doesn’t then to live as though God doesn’t exist and then discover too late that he does. Therefore, the most prudent choice is to believe.

Unfortunately, like many others who have come before him, Adams appears to misunderstand the intention behind the famous argument. The Wager was not intended to provide a purely rational contingency plan to escape hell and enjoy paradise instead. The Wager represents the start rather than the end of the spiritual journey. Pascal used logic to motivate skeptics to take the question of God’s existence seriously, a decision he hoped would ultimately lead to an encounter with God. Thus, “Pascal’s Wager” is an echo of the biblical invitation to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).

. . . Adams is asking the right questions, and Christians can pray that his search ultimately leads him to know and experience God. Yet his desire to put off that encounter until the last possible moment suggests he still has a ways to go. But by God’s grace, it’s not too late.

In other words, good luck with that.

The Colonial Dilemma, The Minnesota Somalis, And "Shooting An Elephant"

Yesterday I began to think about the incongruous problem the Minnesota Somalis represent and what good writers like George Orwell, as opposed to the silly hacks in alt media, would say about it. I mentioned in passing that the Minnesota Somalis represent a peculiar inversion of what British writers early in the last century would have called the "colonial dilemma" which for now I think is well enough expressed in Orwell's 1936 story "Shooting an Elephant".

I was prompted the more to think about this by remarks from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's father:

Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia University professor and father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.), called Columbia's new anti-Semitism task force a "prosecutorial agency" during a recent University Senate meeting. Professor Mamdani compared the panel to imperial British colonizers using their race-based "divide and rule" strategy to maintain power, according to an unofficial transcript obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

According to Wikipedia, Mahmood Mamdani

is an Indian-Ugandan anthropologist, academic, and political commentator. He is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology, political science, and African studies at Columbia University. . . . [He] was born on 23 April 1946 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, the year before the end of British Raj. He was raised in Kampala, Uganda, as part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa. Both his parents, a Gujarati Muslim couple, were born and raised in the British territory of Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania). The couple moved to Bombay while his father attended college there. The family returned to Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, when Mamdani was two, and moved to Uganda when he was five or six years old.

. . . Mamdani was one of 23 Ugandan students in the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a US-funded scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada between 1959 and 1963. Mamdani graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967.

He then rose through the US, UK, and African academic establishments until his appointment at Columbia in 1999. His orientation is fashionably Marxist and postmodern. However, I'm puzzled that a US university would be interested in an anthropologist who specializes in British colonialism, since the US had limited experience with colonies of the European sort -- the most important was the Philippines, which it held for less than 50 years, giving them independence at the very start of the decolonization movement. Marxist and postmodern analyses of colonialism have little to do with the actual US experience.

In fact, Mamdani seems to owe his career to what might be called US "inverse colonialism", programs of importing former colonials to the US, in his case the Kennedy Airlift. From this perspective, later phenomena like the mass immigration of Somalis to the US, primarily in Minnesota, is just a special case of an overall trend. But this trend, as far as I can see, turns the Marxist interpretation of colonialism on its head.

Along with slave-grown cotton in the United States, primary production by impoverished Irish farmers was one of the pillars of English industry. Irish dispossessed peasants, moreover, fled the country in search for better conditions, swelling the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed in British industrial centres. Processes of colonisation and impoverishment in Ireland thus affected the condition of the working class in England as well, from both material and moral points of view. Workers in England did not just compete against each other. The anti-Irish racism instigated by the English ruling class fomented antagonism between Irish and English workers, the latter being seen by the Irish as complicit in English domination over Ireland. And this antagonism, for Marx, “is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

To make up for their losses, capitalists in less developed nations increase the amount of absolute surplus value they extract from the working class. They do so by lengthening and intensifying the working day and, crucially, pushing wages to below the value of the labour power. Marx himself had these processes of “super-exploitation” in mind when he affirmed that wages in India were depressed even below the worker’s modest needs.

So according to Marx, directly importing African workers to the US drives down wages for the US working class and foments continued antagonism between black and white workers. This is one effect of the programs that have imported Haitian and Somali workers. But this bypasses the conflict between the younger Marx and the older Marx over the actual benefits of colonialism:

The Communist Manifesto is pretty rhapsodic about the power of capital to 'create a world after its own image', by drawing 'all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization' through its improvement of productive techniques and washing the world with cheap commodities by which it 'forces the barbarians intensely obstinate hatred of the foreigners to capitulate'.

This brings us to the colonial dilemma and George Orwell. Wikipedia makes the important point that there is no separate record that Orwell ever actually shot an elephant in the course of his duties as a police officer in 1920s Burma, and there's "no conclusive evidence to prove it to be fact or fiction". Let's add to this the textual evidence that the narrator is unreliable, or at best has reassessed his youthful views:

For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. . . . But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.

The narrator's problem is simple. A local domesticated elephant has gone into musth (Orwell spells it "must"), a hormonal condition that makes male elephants highly aggressive and unpredictable. In the situation in the story, only the elephant's mahout, or handler, can control it when this happens, but the handler is out of town. The elephant has broken loose and is destroying native huts, as well as killing a laborer. The narrator, as the closest local police officer, has received orders that he must shoot the elephant.

He finds this assignment abhorrent, especially because a crowd of local Burmese has gathered to watch the spectacle, but also because they expect to harvest the elephant's meat once it's been killed. But also, when he encounters the elephant himself, it's just calmly eating grass and no longer hurting anyone. Nevertheless, he has his orders, and the crowd clearly expects him to do this. At the end of the story, he reflects,

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

But let's put this last paragraph in the context of the earlier: he's already told us he was working from a pseudo-enlightened perspective of a young Englishman with all the right views, which in the intervening years have apparently moderated -- "I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it", speaking particularly in 1936 of Mussolini's Ethiopian invasion, and possibly of the Spanish Civil War as well.

In working his way through the ethical problem of whether the elephant should be shot, even if at the time of the shooting it seemed no longer to be on a rampage, he raised the question of whether a rabid dog should be shot, and he determined it should. He raised the question of the elephant's value to its owner, but he realized that the elephant had broken loose, its handler was out of town, and the owner was still responsible for the elephant.

In the final paragraph, he trots out the views of his European colleagues. The older ones say he was right; the younger ones say the elephant was worth more than a human laborer; too bad it had to be shot, which poses its own ethical issue. He then gives a past-tense account of his immediate emotions -- if the coolie was killed, it put him legally in the right, but mostly he was happy to keep from looking a fool. But this is an older self looking at a younger self whom he's already established is unreliable.

The real colonial dilemma we see here is that despite his immediate emotion, shame that he was glad to avoid looking a fool, the narrator was about as right as anyone can be who's been put into that situation. His experienced colleagues say he was right. He realizes his action was legally right. He's still not comfortable with it; nobvody likes to shoot a rampaging elephant, especially one that's just contentedly eating grass when he finds it.

But he's found himself in a colony where he's part of colonial authority, which means protecting the native population from rampaging elephants, and in fact, without Western industrial weapons, Burmese indigenous authority wouldn't be able to protect its own population even as well from rampaging elephants. Whatever the justice or injustice of colonial rule, the natives are probably better off than they'd have been without it. And it's worth repeating that there's no evidence Orwell himself ever had to shoot an elephant under such circumstances; he's speaking of the issue as a general matter here.

This is Orwell's notion of the colonial dilemma, and it's not terribly far from Marx's colonial dilemma: under European capitalism, even at its least restrained, colonial people are probably better off than otherwise. But now we get to the incongruous situation of the Minnesota Somalis, which applies equally to those in Ohio or Seattle: they're an indigenous third-world population that at one time was variously under Italian, French, and British colonial rule, becoming independent in 1960.

At no point were Somalis ever under US colonial rule, and as East Africans, they were never subject to the Atlantic slave trade that put West African descendants into the US. Yet as a matter of latter-day US policy, they've been imported in the scores of thousands into the US interior, where they aren't indigenous, and they essentially act as colonial people under colonial rule with colonial grievances, something the US on the whole never imposed in most areas, never for long, and certainly never in Africa.

But the outcome is that the US is facing something very much like the colonial dilemma Orwell outlines. As of now, we have little concrete information on how this policy developed, apparently in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1990, augmented by the activities of "faith-based NGOs" that developed the specific paradigm of importing colonial populations en masse into specific US localities, in the process replicating the worst conditions of the early industrial revolution that so horrified Marx.

Backing oursleves out of a situation in which we find oursleves having to act like a colonial power with a colonial population we never intended to have isn't a pretty picture. A big part of the problem is that the Somalis and some others seem to be behaving as though they want to continue to be colonial populations with permanent colonial grievances, when under the US paradigm, they're expected to assimilate and become prosperous as an assimilated group. Solving the problem is going to present difficult issues akin to shooting an elephant.

The Bad Writing In Alt Media

🚨 BREAKING: Hundreds just showed up to protest dozens of ICE agents at a Somali strip mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

You can also see Sen. Aric Putnam (D) trying to hold the crowd back.

“Don’t even get close.” pic.twitter.com/JScmXsBj1H

— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) January 12, 2026

The tweet above is one of several covering recent developments in St Cloud, MN, one of many small cities in the US interior targeted by "faith-based NGOs" that import thousands of third-world migrants in sufficient numbers to disrupt ordinary life within the native citizenry. According to this site,

St. Cloud’s population of roughly 69,000 people has become increasingly diverse in recent years. Its Black population grew from about 1,700 in 2000 to nearly 15,000 in 2020, according to an analysis of census data from the APM Research Lab.

The common line fromn legacy media is that "only 4,000 of these claim Somali descent", but it's hard to imagine where else the other 11,000 come from. In any case, what strikes me about the video is that those in the crowd are behaving much more like people in Mogadishu than Minnesota. The problem that won't go away is that the people of St Cloud have suddenly had their civic life upended without, as they tell the press when they have the chance, having ever had the opportunity to debate or vote on the issue.

But for now, what's more important in the public eye is simply the level of overall fraud generated by the Somalis who've migrated to Minnesota. Federal estimates reported by legacy media are in the $9 billion range, with the perpetrators being in the neighborhood of 80-90% Somali. Actual numbers may be far higher.

What we don't have on the alt media side is writers who can capably illustrate the problem. The one most commonly linked at sites like Real Clear Politics or Instapundit has been Victor Davis Hanson, who has recently had a major health problem and has announced that he will be lowering his public profile during his recovery. While I wish him well, I've long thought that his writing is so predictable that it could be produced by an AI bot.

In fact, I've discovered that if I word a request to Chrome AI mode the right way, it will do this, For instance, "Can you write me a first paragraph of an essay that looks like Victor Davis Hanson wrote it?" It replied,

For more than two millennia, the tragic paradox of Western civilization has been its unique capacity for self-critique, a mechanism originally designed to preserve the polis that has now devolved into a suicidal pathology of the elite. From the dusty hoplite lines at Marathon to the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, the strength of the West has always resided not in the transient dictates of a managerial bureaucracy, but in the rugged, agrarian virtues of the independent citizen and the unapologetic defense of absolute moral truths. Yet today, we witness a frantic retreat from this classical heritage, as a globalized technocracy—insulated by unprecedented luxury and historical amnesia—seeks to dismantle the very foundations of consensual government and meritocracy that once ensured its survival

While I have every good wish for Prof Hanson's recovery, it seems to me that recuperation or no, his handlers should be able to rely on AI to keep up production without any need for his active intervention. But with a sudden shortage fromm the VDH supply chain, Instapundit and Real Clear Politics have had to fall back on Roger Kimball, who is normally seen as a cultural commentator who decries "the politicization and 'dumbing down' of Western culture and the arts". But just this morning, I found him filling the former VDH slot at Real Clear Politics with something pretty dumb itself:

I suspect that Somalis around the country – especially, but not exclusively, in Minneapolis – wish about now that they had spent more time studying the wit and wisdom of Gertrude Stein.

Wait a moment. Gertrude Stein? After looking at the video clip in the X post above, I might expect an appropriate reference might be made to, oh, early Winston Churchill on African colonial issues in The River War, or possibly George Orwell's resignation at the colonial dilemma in "Shooting an Elephant" -- that is, if you need to reach that far back to understand the Minnesota Somalis. There's lots more to say without going back a hundred years.

But Gertrude Stein? I went again to Chrome AI mode, and I asked, "Did Gertrude Stein have anything important to say?" It just shilly-shallied around with an answer: "Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a central figure of 20th-century modernism whose 'important' contributions range from revolutionizing literary language to coining era-defining phrases." Those phrases, it explained, included

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose": This iconic line from her poem Sacred Emily was intended to restore the power of the word "rose," making it real again rather than just a poetic symbol.

But I searched in vain for le mot juste in her writing that might apply to the question of Somali fraud. But that polymath exponent of Western Civ Roger Kimball seems to think he's found it: "A modicum of fraud among friends often gets a pass. Overdo it, however, and the authorities get waspish." So, are the authorities "waspish"? I don't think so. All they're doing is redirecting federal resources, from IRS auditors to immigration police, to a generally recognized problem. Here's a definition of "waspish":

Irritable, short-tempered, or prone to making cutting or biting remarks. "She unleashed a waspish retort in response to the criticism."

So, are the authorities "waspish"?

The Treasury Department is taking a closer look at financial transactions between Minnesotan residents and businesses and Somalia as the federal government ramps up its immigration crackdown in the state, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters on Friday during a visit to the state.

Bessent said his agency has launched a series of actions to combat fraud in the state and has launched investigations into four businesses that people use to wire money to family members abroad to do more to scrutinize transactions.

There's nothing irritable, short-tempered, or biting here, just a matter-of-fact response to the problem. So why did Kimball even use the Gertrude Stein quote? But other than finding that quote, at best only tangential to the circumstances, Kimball has little else to say. He concludes,

Donald Trump should stop all federal welfare funds to offending venues while a thorough audit – very thorough and very lengthy – is conducted. And as much of the “Somali community” as possible should be repatriated to where it belongs: Somalia. That is why God made Tom Homan.

This guy is nothing but a dollar-store William Buckley, but Buckley would at least have found a better quote from someone like Churchill or Orwell. But let's recognize that Buckley would never have been MAGA in any case. It's a najor problem that we don't have better writers on the populist side to make our points.

Trump's NATO Strategy Updated

Via the UK Evening Standard:

Britain is in talks with European allies about deploying a military force to Greenland in an effort to dissuade Donald Trump from seizing the Arctic island.

Military chiefs are drawing up plans for a possible Nato mission that would involve troops, warships and aircraft protecting the strategically important territory from Russian and Chinese aggression.

British officials have held discussions with counterparts in Germany and France in recent days as preparations for the operation begin to take shape, The Telegraph reported.

The plans, which remain at an early stage, are aimed at persuading Mr Trump to drop his controversial plans to annex Greenland, a self-governed island that is part of Denmark.

European nations believe that significantly boosting their military presence in the Arctic would allow the US president to claim victory by arguing that America's allies were shouldering more of the financial burden.

As best I can figure this out, the European NATO countries, or maybe just the UK, France, and Germany, would deploy troops, warships, and aircraft to Greenland in order to reassure Trump that they would defend Greenland under existing NATO conditions, so that Trump wouldn't feel the need to annex Greenland to the US. His answer was implicit in the reply he gave to a reporter on Air Force One last night:

I like NATO. I just wonder whether or not if needed NATO would they be there for us? I'm not sure they would,' Trump said.

In other words, whatever force NATO could deploy in the Arctic independently of the US would be subject to possible hestation by NATO to stand up to any actual threat from Russia or China. Trump is clearly too much of a realist to accept any "reassurances" from NATO in that area. In fact, the "discussions" about NATO deployment to the Arctic must surely be aimed at suggesting to Trump that he would be fighting NATO if he chose military action in Greenland, which would end NATO.

What would be the global strategic effect of ending the NATO alliance? This site gives a hint:

The US’ 16% share of Nato Common Funding is widely recognized to be leveraged into 100% of Nato’s integrated command and control/intelligence (C3I) capability (i.e., the US is the glue that holds Nato’s integrated C3I together). In short, without the US, Nato would lose its airborne warning and control systems, most if not all of its ability to carry out joint training and exercises, management of joint facilities and infrastructure, common communications capability and Nato’s multinational integrated military command structure. Moreover, Nato would lose almost all of its strategic intelligence collection capabilities and the majority of its battlefield surveillance capability. Critical intelligence integration capabilities would also be impacted, meaning that any post-US Nato force would, in effect, be fighting blind.

In other words, if Trump were to conduct a military operation against Greenland in opposition to NATO, NATO would lose its intelligence ability or battlefield surveillance, which would previously have been solely a US capability. NATO without the US would also be without the B-2 bombers and other advanced weapons that have been key to recent US military operations. In addition, NATO forces would need some sort of transport to fight in Greenland, as no NATO forces other than the US are currently stationed there. But according to the same link,

The critical aspect of the Nato alliance is Article 5, or the commitment to common defense. Key to executing this commitment is the ability to deploy sufficient combat power rapidly to meet any emergent threat. While all Nato members possess indigenous logistical support capability, there is only one Nato member that has sufficient logistical capacity in terms of airlift/sealift/combat sustainability to meet the expeditionary needs of any Article 5 commitment, and that is the US. Should the US withdraw its support from Nato, the alliance would find itself virtually paralyzed in terms of being able to mobilize and deploy sufficient forces necessary to meet a military challenge from Russia [or the US itself]. Moreover, given the degree to which many Nato members are reliant upon US equipment, the question of maintaining this equipment under combat conditions void of US logistical support becomes a real issue.

At the UK Daily Mail link above,

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew back to Washington, Trump was asked whether taking Greenland could damage relations with the alliance.

'If it affects NATO, then it affects NATO,' Trump said. 'But, you know, they need us much more than we need them, I will tell you that right now.'

So if NATO were to dissolve the alliance and resist a U S occupation of Greenland militarily, it wouldn't have US satellite intelligence to launch its missiles, and it wouldn't have US logistical support to move its forces to Greenland. Nor would it have B-2 bombers, electronic weapons, and apparently other advanced resources like the directed energy weapon that was reportedly used in Venezuela.

One thing I've noticed in the current discussions is that Canada is nowhere to be found in any collective mooting about military alliances against the US. I suspect they would want to maintain as much distance as they possibly could from any such thing.

This takes me back to the business-school analysis of Trump's negotiating style that I keep referencing here: Trump studies the strengths and weaknesses of his opponents' negotiation options carefully, but he prefers to negotiate with opponents who have no options. As he just put it, NATO needs the US more than the US needs NATO.

So Much Happening, So Little News

Let me see if I can tally up what's happened just since tbe new year:

• Trump raided Venezuela and removed its dictator
• Tim Walz dropped out of the Minnesota governor's race in the face of widespread allegations that he enabled Somali fraud
• There have been two ICE officer-involved shootings that appear to have been justified but badly misreported by legacy media
• Inchoate questions have been asked about who's funding national anti-ICE demonstrations
• Anti-government demonstrations have spread in Iran, leading to expectations that the mullahs may fall
• Trump has intensified his campaign to take over Greenland
• A coalition of NATO and other countries have organized to fund a continuing war in Ukraine
• The Trump administration has upped its efforts to investigate and eliminate fraud by and on behalf of illegal migrants.

The puzzling thing is how little intelligent or informed reporting or commentary we're seeing about any of these developments. For instance, what's the plan in Venezuela? I haven't even seen anyone ask this question seriously. What's the plan in Iran? Ditto -- nobody's asking. What's the plan for Greenland? What's the plan for Ukraine, with the Europeans now wanting to continue the war?

I feel certain that Trump and his immediate circle do in fact have plans for all this; that's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in the media is bright enoough to be able to prompt them to articulate those plans. For instance, yesterday we had a few reports that went like this:

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing preliminary plans for an attack on Iran, including the option of large-scale airstrikes.

Officials are considering how to follow through on President Trump’s recent elevated threats against the Islamic Republic, including what sites might be targeted, insiders told the Wall Street Journal.

A massive aerial strike campaign on multiple Iranian military targets is one option being considered — although Washington has not reached consensus on a plan of action.

If I were an editor, I wouldn't stand for this. Let's consider what we've learned about how Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth do business, based on what we've seen from the June B-2 raids on Iran and the strikes on Caracas: there's meticulous planning and execution based on thorough electronic and photographic intelligence. The idea that right now, they're just preparing preliminary plans and targeting options, but so far without consensus, is simply incredible.

On one hand, we might attribute media sluggishness to the mere speed with which all these developments have taken place, but this is in some measure due to continuing media inertia in the face of how Trump 2.0 works: his aim is to overwhelm the media with events. I think Mark Halperin unintentionally explains things in his rationale for his show The Morning Meeting: at 9 AM each weekday, the editors all get together and decide what the news items for the day will be and how they'll cover them.

The problem now is that Trump gets about four hours of sleep a night, and the rest of the time he's not asleep, he's working. He's calling cabinet secretaries at midnight and giving them new projects, and the results keep falling out throughout the day. A single morning meeting to figure out the day's spin isn't going to cut it.

He holds an oil executives' roundtable to talk about Venezuela, but oh by the way, he has important things to say about Greenland as well. Nobody in media, alt or legacy, is equipped to deal with this. We might expect more from alt media, but let's face it, they're amateurs, they can't write, and they can't think any better than legacy reporters and commentators.

I hate the idea that we've just got to expect to keep being surprised, but it is what it is. Trump is simply ahead of all of them.

Trump Has More To Say About Greenland

As of this morning:

Political leaders in Greenland strongly rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's proposal to bring the Arctic island under American control, saying Greenland’s future belongs to its people.

In a joint statement on Friday, Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four party leaders made it clear that any decisions about the territory’s status, which is now a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark, must be made by Greenlanders themselves.

“We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes — we want to be Greenlanders,” they said.

As of yesterday,

US President Donald Trump on Friday again suggested the use of force to seize Greenland as he brushed aside Denmark's sovereignty over the autonomous Arctic island.

"We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not," Trump said at a White House meeting with oil executives looking to benefit in Venezuela, where the United States last week overthrew the president.

"I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way," Trump said when asked of Greenland.

. . . "We're not going to have Russia or China occupy Greenland. That's what they're going to do if we don't. So we're going to be doing something with Greenland, either the nice way or the more difficult way."

Commentators keep referring to the Louisiana Purchase as a sort of paradigm for US expansion, I assume because they learned about it in middle school history class. But the Louisiana Purchase brought about a number of other complex issues they don't talk about in middle school, such as the status of Florida. For instance, just how far to the east of New Orleans did the purchase extend? And Spain laid claim to "East Florida", the Florida peninsula, but Spain had never been in actual control of the interior, which was an increasing problem at the Georgia border.

To stop the Seminole based in East Florida from raiding Georgia settlements and offering havens for runaway slaves, the U.S. Army led increasingly frequent incursions into Spanish territory. This included the 1817–1818 campaign by Andrew Jackson that became known as the First Seminole War, after which the U.S. effectively seized control of Florida; albeit for purposes of lawful government and administration in Georgia and not for the outright annexation of territory for the United States. According to [Secretary of State John Quincy] Adams, the U.S. had to take control because Florida . . . had become "a derelict open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States, and serving no other earthly purpose than as a post of annoyance to them". . . . Some of President Monroe's cabinet demanded Jackson's immediate dismissal for invading Florida, but Adams realized that his success had given the U.S. a favorable diplomatic position.

Trump's view of Greenland at this point isn't too far from the Adams-Monroe view of Florida: unless the US owns it, it's going to be open to anyone. In the case of Florida, Andrew Jackson had already effectively seized it; in the case of Greenland, Trump is aggressively pursuing de facto seizure and ownership, the easy way or the hard way.

Spain officially ceded Florida to the US via the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty that cleaned up ambiguities in the Louisiana Purchase by giving Florida to the US, establishing the boundary between the Louisiana Purchase and Spanish Mexico, and eliminating any Spanish claim to the Oregon Country.

This piece linked yesterday at Real Clear Politics takes the position that the US already has, but hasn't effectively exercised, the ability to take full de facto control of Greenland, short of acquiring it outright:

[T]he administration should do exactly what Denmark has been asking it to do – request expansive military access under the terms of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement. Copenhagen repeatedly argues that Washington does not need closer relations with Greenland because it enjoys broad military access under the terms of the 1951 treaty, yet has rarely exercised those rights in recent decades. President Trump should take this issue off the table immediately by requesting Danish cooperation in transferring substantial U.S. assets to Greenland, including anti-submarine warfare aircraft; Arctic training and support personnel and equipment; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets; and appropriate Special Operations units.

. . . Finally, to make clear the long-term view of Greenland as an integral part of the Western Hemisphere and a key node in hemispheric defense, the administration can designate Greenland as a “Tier-1 Strategic Territory of the United States,” bureaucratic nomenclature equivalent to Guam or Diego Garcia. This sends a powerful signal to the world, and to Congress, that the administration will resource its long-term effort to bring Greenland closer to the United States commensurate with its strategic significance.

When I read this, I had an immediate sense that Trump would be impatient with all this bureaucratic shilly-shallying, and he'd want to cut the Gordian Knot. He did this yesterday afternoon in the same remarks he gave at the oil executives' roundtable:

President Donald Trump says the US needs to "own" Greenland to prevent Russia and China from doing so.

"Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don't defend leases. And we'll have to defend Greenland," Trump told reporters on Friday, in response to a question from the BBC.

We will do it "the easy way" or "the hard way", he added. The White House said recently the administration is considering buying the semi-autonomous territory of fellow Nato member Denmark, but it would not rule out the option of annexing it by force.

. . . Under existing agreements with Denmark, the US has the power to bring as many troops as it wants to Greenland.

But speaking to reporters in Washington, Trump said a lease agreement was not good enough.

"Countries can't make nine-year deals or even 100-year deals," he said, adding that they had to have ownership.

"I love the people of China. I love the people of Russia," Trump said. "But I don't want them as a neighbour in Greenland, not going to happen."

"And by the way Nato's got to understand that," the US president added.

When I was in school, getting mostly the middle-school version of US history even through my time as an undergraduate, questions like the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War, Seward's Folly, manifest destiny, the Spanish-American War, and the Mexican Punitive Expedition seemed little more than remote footnotes. The US boundaries had been firmly and finally established with the 49th and 50th states, a perfect round number; the whole question of how they'd gotten that way was a recondite footnote. US history, frankly, was over. The borders are established. Everything that needed to be done has been done.

All of a sudden, renewed US expansion has become a front-burner issue, and everything is open to rethinking.