Bad Advice From Archbishop Broglio

Via The Pillar:

The archbishop of the U.S. military services said Sunday that he does not believe military action to take control of Greenland could be justified – and that U.S. troops in good conscience could refuse orders to do so.

Speaking to the BBC on Jan. 18. Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services said he “cannot see any circumstances” in which an American military operation to take control of Greenland or another ally’s territory could fulfill the criteria for a just war.

Asked whether he is concerned about Catholics serving in the military who might be asked to participate in a military operation to take control of Greenland, Broglio responded, “I am obviously worried, because they could be put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable.”

In this case, I think Abp Broglio is obscuring the difference between a clearly illegal order and one that a particular individual may feel violates his moral or philosophical principles. I asked Chrome AI mode, which is generally reliable on less controversial issues, "What happens if you refuse to obey a military order you think is illegal?" It answered in part,

In the U.S. military, you have both a legal right and an affirmative duty to disobey orders that are "manifestly illegal". However, doing so is legally perilous because you bear the burden of proof if the order is later determined to be lawful.

If you refuse an order you believe is illegal, you . . . will likely be detained and may face immediate charges of insubordination under Article 90 (willful disobedience of a superior officer) or Article 92 (failure to obey a lawful order) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

A military judge, not a jury, will ultimately determine the lawfulness of the order. If the order is found to be lawful, you face severe penalties including dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay, and up to two years of confinement (more in wartime).

. . . To be legally refused, an order must be manifestly unlawful, meaning its illegality is obvious to a person of ordinary sense.

A good example of the uncertainty surrounding what orders might be illegal is the case of the 1968 My Lai massacre. Although no soldiers involved refused alleged orders to kill civilian villagers, two officers, Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley, were court martialed for allegedly giving illegal orders. The evidence indicated that none of the orders, given verbally and recalled differently in different accounts, was explicitly illegal.

Medina was acquitted, while Calley, although convicted, appealed his case and eventually had his sentence considerably reduced. This suggests that in even that case, a soldier who refused orders that weren't clearly, unambiguously illegal would be on shaky ground if the matter reached court martial.

But this is a completely different matter from the situation Abp Broglio is outlining, where a Catholic soldier feels that a military seizure of Greenland violates just war doctrine and, for instance, refuses deployment. In this case, his order of deployment would be completely legal; he just finds it morally objectionable. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Could a military member legally refuse an order if he felt it violated just war doctrine?" It replied, in part,

In the U.S. military, a member can legally refuse an order only if it is unlawful. While just war doctrine informs international laws that the U.S. follows, a service member cannot legally refuse an order simply because they believe it violates the philosophical or moral principles of that doctrine.

. . . "Just war" doctrine is divided into two parts, and the law treats them differently:

Jus in bello (Conduct in War): If an order violates the legal rules of conduct (e.g., a war crime), a member must refuse it.

Jus ad bellum (Justice of War): Military members generally do not have the legal right to refuse to participate in a war they believe is unjust or lacks a legitimate cause. Personal, political, or philosophical disagreement with the war itself is not a legal defense for disobeying a lawful order to deploy or fight.

A good historical example is the case of the 1846-48 Mexican War, in which the US gained Texas, California, and the territory in between. This was as controversial at the time as the Viet Nam War was more than a century later. Ulysses S Grant in his autobiography explains how, as a young Army officer, he was personally opposed to the war, but he served and followed orders throughout. This would be the normal ethos in the US military, and any service member who refused orders on philosophical grounds would be justifiably court martialed. CCC 2309 tacitly acknowledges this after outlining the principles of just war doctrine:

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

According to Catholic Answers,

But unlike principles of doctrine and morality, the Church has not definitively taught which specific answers the faithful should embrace when it comes to implementing moral principles—like justice or care for the poor—in the public sphere.

In other words, the Church acknowledges that "those who have responsibility for the common good" have a degree of latitude in determining military policy, and it isn't up to individual Catholics to decide whether to refuse lawful orders -- and in this case, an order to deploy to Greenland would be lawful, just as much as then-Lieutenant Grant acknowledged that an order to deploy to Mexico was lawful.

It's unfortunate that Abp Broglio appears to be giving imperfect and unreliable advice to his flock in the military services.

"This Seems Like The Beginning Of A Joke"

From Don Surber Monday:

The frenemy countries want NATO to stand up to the United States. This is laughable because the USA created NATO after the Eurocide of World War II. NATO was an excuse for America to place troops along the Iron Curtain. The curtain fell but the troops are still there.

Hey, we are not immune to idiocy.

However, Denmark, France and Germany act like they invented idiocy. This weekend’s warrior cosplay by the mousey mites on the ice in Greenland was farcical.

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said, “Imagine 15 Italians, 15 French, 15 Germans in Greenland. This seems like the beginning of a joke.”

Just this morning:

European opposition ⁠to President Donald Trump's bid to acquire Greenland and his proposed "Board of Peace" initiative has disrupted plans for an economic support package for postwar Ukraine, the Financial Times reported ‍on Wednesday.

A planned announcement of an $800 billion prosperity ‍plan to be agreed between Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. at the World Economic Forum ⁠in Davos this week has been delayed, the report said, citing six officials.

From The Guardian this past Sunday:

Trump’s weekend announcement that eight countries that have supported Greenland would face tariffs unless there was a deal to sell the territory to the US was another hammer to the transatlantic alliance, mocking the notion that the US is Europe’s ally. The eight countries include six EU member states, as well as Norway and the UK, the latter unprotected by the much vaunted “special relationship”. It suggests that Europe’s strategy of flattering and appeasing the US president has failed.

From Barron's on Monday:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday he was worried US President Donald Trump's push to take Greenland could be diverting focus away from Russia's invasion, now approaching its four-year mark.

Trump last week threatened European nations with tariffs of up to 25 percent for opposing his plans to acquire Greenland, drawing anger from Brussels and putting the NATO military alliance under unprecedented strain.

. . . "I'm worried about any loss of focus during a full-scale war," Zelensky told reporters.

Yesterday, The Guardian weighed in again:

The strain is already intense for Europe. Trump’s pressure is designed to expose EU fault lines and sow internal division by forcing member states to prioritize different existential threats and divergent interests. Denmark has a near-existential interest in preventing this annexation. France and Germany have an interest in demonstrating EU cohesion, yet risk seeing their vital access to US export markets severed.

. . . In the face of this trauma, the traditional European habit will be to try to weather the storm. There is a deep-seated institutional hope in Brussels and Berlin that this is a temporary aberration – that if Europe simply absorbs the tariffs and waits until 2028, transatlantic relations will return to “normal”.

This reflex must be actively resisted. The wait and see approach is no longer a strategy. It is a recipe for perpetual vassalage. The Greenland crisis is not just bad weather. It is a structural shift. European leaders must use this crisis as the necessary political catalyst to further the continent’s own sovereign defenses.

Well, European leaders have already risen to the threat: they've put 15 Italians, 15 French, and 15 Germans in Greenland, except the Germans have already pulled out. But The Guardian nevertheless realizes how serious things have become:

Producing the financial resources for an independent defense will take years; every month spent debating is a month lost. The choice is no longer between the status quo and integration. It is between a painful European rebirth or a slow descent into a world where the EU collapses internally, its security is in tatters and it becomes a target for expansion in Moscow.

Trump seems to be one of the few people who's come to the recognition that Moscow hasn't been able to make headway in Ukraine in four years. The stalemate between Russia and Ukraine is increasingly pointless; men of military age have fled Ukraine to avoid conscription and the meat grinder; the country is recognized as hopelessly corrupt, yet Zelensky continues in power. But NATO and the EU want to continue that increasingly irrelevant situation, and The Guardian has decided the solution is for Europe to rearm to maintain the status quo.

There's a sudden consensus that Trump's focus on Greenland is breaking NATO and possibly the EU, and it's become the main topic at Davos. This is simply remarkable. Trump seems to be upending the post-1945 consensus, just like that, with Greenland as the fulcrum of the lever.

Don Lemon's Protracted Career Sunset

INTENT: The opening to Don Lemon’s insane livestream is an admission of foreknowledge that the group he was in contact with was going to storm a church, based on his prior communications with its leader. pic.twitter.com/g0GVHB4871

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) January 19, 2026

It's intriguing that two high-profile leaders of the Minnesota ICE riots are has-beens, Tim Walz, who ended his reelection campaign after revelations of Somali fraud, and Don Lemon, who was fired by CNN in 2023:

Don Lemon landed in hot water earlier this year after comments he made about Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a former UN ambassador and governor of South Carolina.

Ms Haley was not "in her prime", Lemon said in February, a remark widely decried as sexist.

. . . "I'm just saying what the facts are - Google it," he added, in response to objections from his female co-hosts, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.

Lemon issued a statement on the same day saying he regretted his "inartful and irrelevant" comments. He also apologised to the newsroom and agreed to partake in "mandatory training" to address the incident.

Unmentioned by legacy media as of 2023 but almost certainly much closer to the real reason for his firing was a 2018 episode in a Hamptons bar:

Dustin Hice says in his Suffolk County Supreme Court suit that he was slinging drinks in July 2018 for The Old Stove Pub in Sagaponack when he and his coworkers decided to go out for drinks after work one night.

The group headed to Murf’s Backstreet Tavern in Sag Harbor, where Hice told The Post, “I see out of the corner of my eye, it’s Don Lemon’’ there, too.

“I had had two beers, maybe three at the most,’’ Hice recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, Don, let me buy you a drink.’ I turned to Nick the bartender and said, ‘Hey, Nick, let me get two [vodka] Lemon Drops’ and put two fingers in the air.

. . . As alleged in his complaint, Hice, 38, told The Post, “About 5 or 10 minutes later, Don gets up, walks around the bar, comes up right up to me and puts his hands down his board shorts. He rubs himself aggressively, his penis and whatever else down there.”

Lemon then “shoved his index and middle fingers in Plaintiff’s mustache and under Plaintiff’s nose,’’ according to Hice’s suit, which was filed over the weekend.

“And he goes, ‘Do you like p—y or d–k?’ And he kept saying, ‘P or D? P or D?’ He said it three or four times. I’m like, ‘Whoa man, what the hell?’ ” Hice claimed.

Hice eventually dropped the lawsuit in 2022, but accounts suggest that CNN's legal department had had to get involved, and the story likely contributed to a consensus on mahogany row that Lemon was a loose cannon. Since his firing, he's become "independent", with a Don Lemon Show on YouTube, Substack, Facebook, and Instagram.

Despite the growing audience and praise, Lemon acknowledged that it wasn’t always easy to become CEO of his own media company, overseeing operational demands and serving as talent. “It’s been a learning experience. It has been frightening, thrilling, and terrifying all at the same time,” he said. “Every day, even when people doubt you. . . just keep going. Because it doesn’t matter. What people think about you doesn’t really matter.”

The problem at this point is that he doesn't have a major corporation's law department to back him up, and this comes at a time when he already needs to be talking to expensive attorneys:

🚨 JUST IN: Asst. AG Harmeet Dhillon says those who paid for, coordinated, or participated in the attack on a MN Church made a “big—BIG—mistake”

This comes as @AAGDhillon announced Don Lemon is facing FEDERAL CHARGES under the Klan Act for his role.

PERP WALKS INCOMING!🔥 pic.twitter.com/FARddMH4Bz

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) January 19, 2026

Dhillon, a Sikh, gave an extensive explanation of the federal case against Lemon and others for disrupting a Christian service to Benny Johnson:

United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, in an interview on "The Benny Show" with Benny Johnson, said the DOJ will pursue charges for the people who stormed a Minneapolis church during service to carry out an anti-ICE protest, including former CNN host Don Lemon.

"Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility," Dhillon said. "He went into the facility, and then he began — quote, unquote — 'committing journalism,' as if that's sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t."

"I don't know what he is now, but journalism is not a badge or a shield that protects you from criminal consequences when you are part of a crime," Dhillon said. "And I think the videos show how close he was to these folks. I think further evidence will show more information about that."

. . . And so, as you know, and as people have said, the prior administration prosecuted people under the FACE Act for peacefully praying outside abortion clinics where unborn children were being killed inside. Now, that's protected by federal law. That's up to Congress.

However, that same law gives us the right at the Department of Justice to prosecute the same kind of conduct vis-a-vis any house of worship. And there's been a lot of talk of the First Amendment thrown around. The First Amendment includes the right to pray without interference.

. . . I'm not going to flag, but the FACE Act has been mentioned as one of the predicates there. In other cases, the Biden DOJ used the Klan Act conspiracy charges tacked on to the FACE Act in the case of protests outside abortion clinics to bring much longer sentences. So, there are a number of tools available to us.

Who funded this? What other crimes may have occurred? Was there a use of the wires or the mails in preparing for this event?

Did anyone cross state lines to do this? All of those are potential predicates for additional federal charges.

Whether or not Lemon is eventually convicted on charges like those Dhillon outlines, his problem right now is that he already needs expensive attorneys to start working on his defense -- and the days when someone like Alan Dershowitz would take his case pro bono are long gone.

The suits at CNN saw this coming years ago. Even CNN didn't have that kind of money. Rush Limbaugh used to call Lemon "the gift that keeps on giving", and it looks like his ability to get into repeated scrapes hasn't stopped. Like Walz, Lemon's career is effectively over.

Now We Hear It: Becca And Renee Weren't "Married"

Julie Kelly reports:

An attorney representing Renee Good’s estate acknowledged in an interview with the Washington Post that Becca Good was not her wife. Antonio Romanucci, the Chicago-based attorney who also represented the family of George Floyd and succeeded in winning a $27 million settlement for the Floyd family, said Renee’s “partner, parents and four siblings want ‘to honor her life with progress toward a kinder and more civil America.” Romanucci further confirmed the pair “were not married.”

On Friday, just a few days after publishing the story about Thompson, the Times had to admit in a separate story that Becca and Renee “were not legally married.” But a review of Times articles published since the shooting does not show that the paper has corrected any previous articles describing Becca Good as the “wife” or “widow” of Renee Good.

This brings back a number of questions I had in the immediate wake of the shooting. Reports at the time characterized Becca as Renee's "wife", apparently without fact checking, for instance, Becca Good, Wife of Renee, Releases Statement: "We Had Whistles. They Had Guns". According to Wikipedia,

A nearby resident said that, after he heard Good's SUV smash, he went outside and saw Rebecca Good "covered in blood" and sitting in front of the building, crying, "You guys just killed my wife".

Clearly the disingenuousness began at the scene. But there are other questions that cascade from the fakery. As I noted on January 9, the SUV Becca and Renee were in was a Honda Pilot, a $50,000 car. That immediately set warning lights flashing for me: who owned that car, and how did they pay for it?

But I put those questions aside if she and Becca were "married" -- it must be community property, although reports were that Renee was a stay-at-home mom:

Good previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union, but was primarily a stay-at-home mom in recent years, the ex-husband said.

So how does a stay-at-home mom drive a $50,000 SUV that isn't community property? The Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed that the vehicle was co-owned by the two women and had been registered to a Kansas City address. So this leads to an entirely reasonable question how Becca was able to afford a $50,000 car. But this is the question that must not be asked:

A push by the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the widow [sic] of Renee Nicole Good after her tragic killing at the hands of a federal immigration officer has sparked a mass resignation of federal prosecutors in Minnesota, reports say.

According to reports, at least a dozen federal prosecutors across Washington and Minnesota have indicated their plans to resign. This includes six federal prosecutors in the state who left their jobs on Tuesday, and another six top prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department in D.C..

. . . The resignations came as a result of a push by top Justice Department officials to investigate Good’s widow, a move that has sparked outrage over the seeming mission to punish a family already grieving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent’s brutal and public killing of Good.

This comes amid flagging efforts to draw equivalence with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Even PBS is acknowledging it's not going well:

Five years ago, video images from a Minneapolis street showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as his life slipped away ignited a social movement.

Now, videos from another Minneapolis street showing the last moments of Renee Good's life are central to another debate about law enforcement in America. . . . Yet compared to 2020, the story these pictures tell is murkier, subject to manipulation both within the image itself and the way it is interpreted.

. . . "The people who are writing the cultural narrative of the Good shooting took notes from the Floyd killing and are managing this narrative differently," said Kelly McBride, an expert on media ethics for the Poynter Institute.

. . . When one online commentator wrote that Good did not deserve to be shot in the face, conservative media figure Megyn Kelly responded, "Yes, she did. She hit and almost ran over a cop."

Poynter's McBride said the media has generally done a good and careful job outlining the evidence that is circulating around in the public. But the administration has also been effective in spreading its interpretation, she said.

Unmentioned in respectable media is also the problem that lesbians are a tough sell. Yesterday's Babylon Bee carried the headline Minnesota Changes Official State Bird To Screaming Lesbian

Following recent developments stemming from political protests and clashes with the federal government across the state, Minnesota announced that it had changed the official state bird to a screaming lesbian.

After the recent spate of screaming lesbians, state officials agreed that a change was needed to modernize the official state bird and make it more fitting and identifiable as embodying what everyone thinks of when they think of Minnesota.

Even before general recognition that Renee and Becca were never formally "married", although they had the legal option of doing this, the constant use of words like "family", "stay-at-home mom", "wife", and "widow" were falling flat. It didn't fit the competing narrative of two former heterosexual marriages and three kids, two from one, one from another, with the six-year-old dropped off at day care before the shooting. Devoted mom indeed.

It's hard not to conclude that legacy media is losing its grip over public opinion.

On Reflection, This Is A Troll

The one thing that's kept bothering me about Scott Adams's "conversion" is that it's a little too much like a three-panel Dilbert strip. In panel 1, a "Christian" tells Dilbert the way to get to heaven is to say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior". In panel 2, Dilbert, on his deathbed, says this and dies. In panel 3, there's a punch line -- I'm not sure what that would be, I'm not Scott Adams, but it would undercut the whole thing the "Christian" told him in panel 1.

Actually, I don't think it would be too far from the sequence below. The context is Adams's revival of the Dilbert strip in March, 2023 as "Dilbert Reborn" following the cancellation of the original strip in the wake of harsh remarks he made about African-Americans that February. The strip's distributor severed ties with Adams, ending the comic's syndication, while his publisher canceled his upcoming next book and removed the others from its offerings.

The sequence below appears to be the "origin story" of Dilbert's rebirth and marks one of Adams's few actual ventures into eschatology (click on the image for a larger copy):

In the sequence, a garbage man encounters Dogbert atop a recycling bin. The garbage man tells Dogbert he can bring Dilbert back in a matter of hours if Dogbert gives him Dilbert's ashes. And as promised, a reborn Dilbert pops up from the recycling bin, angrier than ever. I think this gives some idea of what the final panel might be in the hypothetical three-panel strip of Dilbert on his deathbed I suggested above -- and there might well be a hell involved, certainly not a saccharine heaven with cherubs strumming lyres in the clouds that some observers appear to believe Adams finally endorsed.

And if we put Scott Adams in the tradition of dark freethinking American humorists like Mark Twain and Nathanael West, this seems like a much more consistent outcome. It was, after all, Adams's reaction to the death of his career, only a few years before he had to contemplate his actual demise. But overall, while I don't think Adams was as smart about religion as he could have been, I do think he was much too smart to believe you'll go to heaven if you just say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior", and of course, no reasonable Christian apologist like C S Lewis or Fulton Sheen would claim this in any case, which is why I'm puzzled that figures like Franklin Graham are OK with it.

The problem is that many radical Evangelicals do in fact say this. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are there prominent Christian spokesmen who believe you'll go to heaven if you simply say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior"? It answered in part,

Yes, many prominent Christian spokesmen and evangelists teach that accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the essential requirement for salvation and entry into heaven. This teaching is often centered on the "Sinner's Prayer," a short profession of faith popularized by major evangelical figures throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

It lists Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, and Jack Hyles as proponents of this view, but it includes the caution,

Some critics and spokesmen warn against "easy believism," where a person says the words without genuine heart change. Many teachers, including Billy Graham, emphasize that true belief must involve turning away from sin (repentance) and a change in desires to follow Christ's teachings. Supporters often cite Romans 10:9, which states that if you "confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved". Some modern pastors, such as David Platt, have criticized the "Sinner's Prayer" as a potentially "superstitious" practice not explicitly found in the Bible, arguing it risks giving people false assurance without a radical life change.

This brings me to a problem I struggled with during my undergraduate years. I noticed, without understanding all the implications, that Evangelicals referred to themselves as "Christians", unlike Catholics or main line protestants who referred to themselves more particularly as members of their denominations. Thus if they referred to a "good Christian lady", they meant an Evangelical, and almost certainly not a Catholic or Episcopalian. So I began to ask myself if in fact I was a "Christian" if those who most audibly called themselves "Christian" were so much at variance with what I thought was reasonable Christian belief.

And looking back, I realize that only half a decade before, I'd been through Presbyterian confirmation class, which gave me absolutely no resources even to start to answer this question. But then, decades later, I commented to a fellow parishioner at coffee hour that my wife and I had come into the Catholic Church through RCIA. He replied, "Then you've been better catechized than 90% of the parish here."

I think this is at the root of Scott Adams's final troll: an awful lot of professed Christians believe some very silly stuff, and almost none of them is willing to call it out. All we got when Adams begsn to talk like some doofus in a Dilbert strip was pious umm-hmms from people like Franklin Graham who should know a lot better. At least so far, Bp Barron and Fr Schmitz have kept quiet, but I hope to see a day when even they will speak up.

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.