In the Long Run

I am going to make some predictions today about the long-term evolution of the geopolitical situation, as the twenty-first century moves forward to its end. I will try to figure out where we are going to end up, economically and demographically, when the children being born today have gotten old. But first, since the thing at the top of the news cycle is the armistice between the United States and Iran, I am going to comment on that, and try to fit it into the big picture.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: An American businessman is flying from Mumbai to his home in New York, with a layover in Addis Ababa. Before he can get onto the second plane, he is arrested by Ethiopian police and told that he is wanted by the authorities in Iran, where he will stand trial for sodomy. He protests that he wasn’t in Iran when the acts of sodomy were committed, and that the things that he does in his bedroom are not a crime in either his home country, or in any of the other countries where he has actually done them (he occasionally travels with his partner).

But the Ethiopians don’t care – they have an extradition request from Iran, it came through lawful channels, and the question of whether Iran has jurisdiction over crimes against nature committed in a New York City penthouse is something for the Iranian courts to decide. (And since Iran’s leaders believe that Allah has called them to uphold Quranic morality throughout the whole world, it’s not hard to guess how they will rule.) Naturally, American diplomats protest the whole thing, and the businessman never actually ends up in Iran, though he does spend 27 months under house arrest in Addis Ababa before the Ethiopian government is persuaded to release him, in exchange for a pair of Ethiopian prisoners that the United States has detained in retaliation.

To Americans who are used to seeing their own country respected by other countries, this hypothetical seems completely ludicrous. And yet, from the point of view of people who live in the countries that America doesn’t get along with, it’s pretty much how the world works. Just think about the case of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive who was travelling from Mexico to Hong Kong via Vancouver when she was arrested by Canadian police, and who was nearly extradited to the United States to be tried for trading with Iran in violation of American sanctions – and also of lying to a British bank about the relationship between Huawei and Skycom (a subsidiary of Huawei which handles much of China’s commerce with Iran).

Meng wasn’t in the United States when the alleged crimes were committed, but this didn’t stop the Americans from claiming jurisdiction, nor did it stop their pliant lapdogs in Canada from trying to enforce that jurisdiction. What saved Meng Wanzhou in the end was China’s arrest of two Canadian men on a (probably specious) espionage charge, and its offer to release them in exchange for Meng.

Unlike China, the majority of foreign countries go along with America’s demand that Iran must be isolated from most international markets. They’re not happy about it, but America is able to wring a grudging sort of compliance out of them, since at the end of the day, access to American commerce is just more important than anything that Iran has to offer. Superpowers can throw their weight around, and if a superpower holds a big grudge against a much smaller and less important country, and wants to build a foreign policy around isolating that country (as China has also done with Taiwan) then it’s usually doable. Third parties won’t like it, but they don’t have to; the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Personally, I think that the Iran sanctions have been a mistake on America’s part, mainly because (1) they needlessly antagonize rising powers like India, which would be buying lots of Iranian hydrocarbons if the Yankees weren’t getting in the way, and (2) the main economic beneficiary of the sanctions is Saudi Arabia, whose domestic human rights record is at least as bad as Iran’s.

By the end of the 21^st century, the United States won’t be in a position to do this kind of thing. And chances are that, long before then, our leaders will have regretted using their economic power in such a petty and vindictive way – rather than, for instance, using it to constrain the economic growth of China, a rival which actually poses a serious risk of militarily conquering its neighbors, and displacing the United States as the global hegemon.

And yet, wise or unwise, the sanctions regime was stable… until February 28^th.

About That Peace Deal

Right now most pundits are saying that Donald Trump has suffered a humiliating defeat, and that all of his rhetoric about the “peace deal” that he negotiated at Versailles is a lame attempt to avoid admitting that. One man whose newsletter I read is even comparing America’s loss of power and prestige to what happened to Russia after it lost its war with Japan in 1905.

I think that all of that talk is premature. Yes, it’s true that the plainest interpretation of the deal – sanctions relief plus a $300 billion rebuilding fund in exchange for the opening of the Straits of Hormuz – seems like a capitulation. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The $300 billion isn’t a government appropriation (good luck getting that through Congress); it’s an investment fund and loan-pool that private companies are expected to pay into in the hopes of making a profit, and it isn’t like Donald Trump has a sterling record of getting other people to pony up money when he says that they will (remember the whole “Mexico will pay for the wall” schtick?) Also, “sanctions relief” might be interpreted very differently by each side; there are a lot of small and trivial ways in which the US might loosen the sanctions without actually allowing third parties like China and India to have normal trade relations with Iran, sans fear of US harassment a la Meng Wanzhou.

So there is a serious possibility that Iran opens the straits, and then, over the next six months or so, that the Trump administration drags its feet on its own end of the deal, and reinterprets “sanctions relief” in increasingly weak terms. (Russian diplomats coined a term that translates as “non-agreement-capable” to describe America during the Syrian civil war, and the term is just as apropos in the age of Trump.)

And so Iran’s leaders will be in a difficult position. Should they resume the war, enrage Trump, and possibly end up dead like Ali Khamenei? Or should they let things gradually settle back to the old status quo, with Iran cut out of most markets, but nobody on either side getting shot or bombed? (Recall that the shooting and bombing did not go well for Iran – they lost 3,468 lives; we lost 15. America’s failure to open the straits by force was embarrassing, but if you’re comparing it Russia’s defeat at Tsushima, your brains have fallen out.)

And there is also the problem that one of the things Trump has promised – namely, an end to Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon – is completely beyond the power of any American president to procure. And so, for these and other reasons, I will take the much-celebrated peace deal with a grain of salt.

Oil Isn’t That Important

Fortunately, the Middle East isn’t as important to America as it used to be.

The center of global oil production moves with time. How many people remember that in 1939, the United States pumped 60 percent of the world’s oil, Venezuela and the USSR had about 10.5 percent each, and no other country had more than 3.4 percent… a circumstance that played no small role in deciding the outcome of World War II? By 1980, North America had burned through its easy oil and was only producing about 17 percent of the total, while the Middle East had grown to 31 percent of the global supply. But in 2025, due to hydrofracking, North America was riding high again, with 30 percent of the world’s oil coming from the United States and Canada, while the Middle East was down slightly to 29 percent.

Things will only change more in the future. The world is a big place, and the question of which sources of oil are being accessed at any given time depends on a complicated tangle of slow-acting technological, economic, and political forces. It isn’t a matter of someone being able to say: “We know where all of the oil is, and how much of it there is. And when it runs out (which will happen soon), the wheels will fall off of the global economy.”

I refuse to make the mistakes of the peak oil enthusiasts, who loudly proclaimed that everything would go to smithereens between 2005 and 2008, and who were blindsided by the simple facts that (1) rising prices would allow oil companies to access oil deposits that used to be too deep to profitably drill for, and (2) technological changes mean that people are using energy more efficiently now than they were in the past.

On a per capita basis, peak oil already happened, way back in the 1970s. Since then, mean global oil production has fallen from a little more than five barrels per person per year, to a little less than four. At the same time, the material circumstances of the average human being have vastly improved. And remember that the little kerfuffle over the Straits of Hormuz never sent the price of Brent oil any higher than $106/bbl, well below the $147/bbl all-time high from back in 2008.

The global economy is just more resilient than the fast-crash predictors give it credit for. And part of this is due to fossil-fuel alternatives like solar panels, wind farms, and electric vehicles, which are finally, after more than half a century of slow development, becoming economically competitive. (There is precedent for this in other very-slowly-maturing technologies. Steam engines, for instance, have been used to pump water out of mineshafts since 1698, but they were too inefficient to be good for anything else until James Watt perfected his condenser engine in 1776, and they weren’t widely used to power vehicles for another half century. But look where we are today.)

So if not oil depletion, then what are the long-term geoeconomic threats that could put an end to the world as we know it? After all, I don’t call myself “Twilight Patriot” for nothing…. and also, if you like reading Twilight Patriot, you should…

Subscribe now

The First World and the Third World Need Each Other

There are, broadly speaking, two forms of political economy that are relevant in the 21^st century.

In a first world country, the workforce is well-educated, public officials perform their duties in a timely manner and do not take bribes, contracts are honored, infrastructure is well-maintained, the laws are enforced in a predictable and impartial way, and as a result of all this, the country supports a large, technologically-advanced manufacturing base, and its exports consist mainly of high-quality goods and services, and intellectual property.

In a third world country, the workforce is poorly educated and everybody is running late. Public officials do their jobs sluggishly, hire subordinates based on kinship ties rather than competence, and frequently demand bribes. Contract law is poorly enforced, and crime usually goes unpunished. As a result of all this, most people are poor, all but the simplest manufactured goods must be imported from somewhere else, and most of the exports are raw materials.

After all, since any economic activity in a third world country is very inefficient, the moment that a mineral is mined out of the ground, or that a crop is plucked from the soil, the best thing to do with it is to move it somewhere more business-friendly. The only industries left are the ones that can’t move because they’re tied to the earth. The people in government maintain just enough law and order for these industries to exist – and they are rewarded for it with ample kickbacks).

Of course there are many subtle gradations to this, and countries can move both up and down the value chain. But other major forms of political economy, like medieval feudalism or Soviet-style command economies, have either disappeared entirely, or exist only in irrelevant backwaters like North Korea.

But to understand the present and to predict the future, one must also consider inertia. If you judged the United States by (1) the slowness and unpredictability of its permitting regime, (2) its lack of an efficient rail network, (3) the post-1960s crime boom, (4) the abuse of civil rights laws to secure jobs for unproductive people, and (5) the dismal condition of its manufacturing base compared to what it was half a century ago, then you would think that America has become a third world country. And yet, we still have a lot of high-tech industry, along with the world’s strongest financial and service sectors, and these things are sufficient to keep most of our people very rich by global standards. For now.

Russia is not so lucky. The country that created Sputnik, and that ran neck-and-neck with the United States in the technology race of the mid-20^th-century, is now a more-or-less typical third world country. The civil service has completely surrendered to nepotism and gangsterism. Almost nothing of value is manufactured there. Russia survives by exporting oil, gas, and grain, mostly to China. Military commanders demand bribes from their subordinates, and whoever can’t or won’t pay gets sent to wherever on the battlefront they’re most likely to be killed by Ukrainian drones. (No wonder morale is at rock bottom and many of the troops have to be recruited out of prisons.)

Meanwhile, countries like India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Kenya are in the process of becoming first world countries. It may well take a few decades for them to finish, but even a brief look at statistics from the past quarter century will tell you that on matters like clean water, life expectancy, and the ability to export manufactured goods, they have improved by leaps and bounds. And China seems to have finished this same process, thus confounding the naïve westerners who insisted, since the 1990s, that any country that wanted to have a high-tech, mostly-free-market economy would also have to give its people western-style personal and political freedoms. (A bizarre claim to make, seeing that Nazi Germany was also a brutally totalitarian country in which most industries were privately owned, and where people could get rich by serving the state, so long as they belonged to the correct ethnic group. Most of the time, Americans are eager to compare their adversaries to Nazis… they just didn’t do it the one time when the comparison was a good one.)

So is there going to be a stable equilibrium between the first world and the third world? Will our planet always have an appropriate number of first world societies that invent and manufacture things, and a properly-sized third world hinterland to supply the raw materials? After all, neither can exist without the other. Manufacturing powerhouses like Germany, Japan, and China need to import far more raw materials than they can possibly obtain at home, while service and IP-based countries like the United States need somebody to pay for their services and intellectual property, and third world countries need to import machinery, fertilizers, medicines, and other essential goods, lest even their simple industries collapse, and their populations be forced back to pre-industrial levels by famine and disease.

(When I lived in Ghana, one of the first things I noticed was that everyone there drinks water out of clear plastic bags – you bite the corner of the bag and suck the water out, and then, if you’re like most Ghanaians, you throw the empty bag onto the side of the road, where the plastic trash is so thick that the goats have to push it out of the way in order to graze. The bags are necessary because the tap water isn’t clean. Do the machines that put the clean water into the bags have to be imported? You bet. And without them, there is no keeping 36 million Ghanaians alive in a country that supported barely 2 million people a century ago. The same is true for tractors and fertilizer.)

The Shape of Things to Come

The big, really big, potentially civilization-ending problem is that the first world countries aren’t having enough babies.

This just might be the most important page on Wikipedia. It lists all of the countries in the world, in order of the number of babies that were born there in 2025. India is at the top of the list, just like it’s at the top of the population list. But whereas India is only 1 percent more populous than China, it has almost three times as many babies – 23.4 million compared to 7.9 million. Nigeria comes in third with 7.7 million, followed by Pakistan with 7.0 million. Rounding out the top ten are Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, the United States, Bangladesh, and Brazil. And if you keep going down the list, you just keep seeing more third world countries. The United States, China, and Mexico are the only countries in the top twenty with a higher-than-average per capita GDP. And except for Brazil, the other 17 aren’t even above half the average.

Most of the countries with rapidly growing populations are completely floundering in their attempts to get out of poverty. (See Noah Smith’s post “The Giant Basket Case Countries” for details.) And the economic powerhouses like Germany, Japan, and now China are failing to reverse their low birth rates, try as they might. In China, 40-year-olds outnumber newborns by about 2.5 to 1, which is not good news for people who want their country to have a functioning economy 40 years from now.

Also, whenever a country successfully industrializes, its fertility rate drops. This is what happened with India, which had 4.01 births per woman 35 years ago, and only 2.09 now. And as the smartphone revolution ensures that even lower-middle-class people have endless digital distractions, fertility collapse is happening at lower and lower levels of development. (In the Philippines, for instance, fertility fell to 1.7 last year, down from 4.1 in 1993, despite the smallness of the change in per capita GDP, which rose from $919 to just $4,443.)

One other curious factor to think about is that rich countries that collapse back into third world status don’t see a corresponding baby boom. Russia is still only having 1.37 children per family. There were 1.23 million Russian babies born last year, compared to 1.51 million babies born in Afghanistan, and 1.97 million in Kazakhstan and the other former Asian SSRs. Thus, the Russians are unlikely to starve to death over the next century due to not having enough arable land… but they are at risk of losing the land east of the Ural Mountains to wandering Afghan, Kazakh, and Uzbek war bands, who will do to their country what people like Fritigern and Alaric did to the Roman Empire.

So the apocalypse that it looks like we’re headed for isn’t an environmental catastrophe due to people consuming too many natural resources (since voluntary childlessness in the high-consumption nations seems to have pre-empted that). Nor is it nuclear war (since nobody has anything to gain by starting a nuclear war), nor is it robots rebelling against human control (since contra the hype coming out of Silicon Valley, an AI can’t actually “think” any “thought” that isn’t just the average of its training data.) The apocalypse that we’re actually getting is a baby bust… plus mass migrations as millions of young people from the third world go looking for sustenance in the ruins of the first world.

The Machine Stops

I think that it is very unlikely that artificial neural networks will ever be intelligent enough to rebel against their makers (for arguments as to why, see this post of mine). But they can still learn to do jobs that used to be done by human beings (let’s be honest – if you consider “remembering” to be a cognitive task, then we’ve been outsourcing cognitive tasks to machines since the 3^rd millennium BC). I would not be surprised if, by the midpoint of the 21^st century, most Americans are depending on a fragile, solar-powered electrical grid that nobody really remembers how to service (since the handful of diversity-hires in charge of servicing it are constantly asking an AI what to do next), and which can’t be serviced at all without importing parts from somewhere in Asia (since one of the weaknesses of solar panels is that their supply chain is extremely complicated, and it involves a lot of rare metals, and specialized manufacturing equipment that has to be run at very large scales in ultraclean factories.)

If, at some point, a large war breaks out in Asia and halts the global shipping of high-end electronics, or if those AIs stop running, and the shrinking class of competent tech workers realizes, too late, that they have forgotten how they were built and how they work… then we are in for a great deal of trouble. Electricity, water, roads, tractors, food – if present trends continue, then we will depend for those things on (1) an increasingly fragile collection of global supply chains, (2) a network of machines doing more and more jobs that people have forgotten how to do on their own, and (3) a human workforce that is rapidly aging and shrinking, and is also becoming less meritocratic.

At first, this will look like a slow but seemingly-manageable decline, with remote pieces of the country being gradually abandoned to anarchy, as has been happening for several decades in Russia, South Africa, and Mexico. But it is likely to be followed by an abrupt collapse of the supply chains when there aren’t enough people left to maintain them. “How did you go bankrupt?” said someone in a Hemingway novel. “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

My advice? Live in either a rural area or a small-to-medium-sized city (400,000 people, tops. And no more than a million in the metro). Grow a backyard garden and keep chickens if you can. Own a firearm and know how to use it – and that also goes for exploding quadcopters, if you can get them. Live near your family if possible. Make friends. Get involved in your church, or in a private school, or a fraternal lodge or a farmers’ co-op or something of that sort. If you and your family are going to survive what is coming, you will need skills and friendships that transcend politics. None of the things that I am describing will become more or less likely as a result of this year’s election outcomes. The red-vs-blue contests are ripples. What is coming is a tidal wave.

We’re not exactly living through the end of the modern world. But there is a serious chance that the collection of disturbances that began in 2020, and that are still going strong, might be seen by future historians as the beginning of the end.

The main subject of this month’s post will be a book review of Jonathan Oldenburg’s fantasy novel, Tears from Iron. This is a fine book which does a fairly good job of telling a non-woke story, and introducing well-rounded characters that push back on some of the sillier aspects of contemporary pop literature.

The last time that I posted on Twilight Patriot was when I wrote about the war between the United Sates and Iran, and explained my reasons for thinking that neither side has a sound strategy or is likely to achieve its long-term aims. With the war now almost three months old, the lack of decisive victories on either side seems to have borne this out. Donald Trump has failed to open the Straits of Hormuz, and his enemies have failed to crash the oil market badly enough to wring concessions out of Trump. And so, with there being little to comment on war-wise at the moment, I can return to one of this blog’s recurring topics – the efforts of a handful of right-wing writers to fight back against left-wing dominance of popular culture.

You can see my previous review of Alexander Macris’ work here, and of Richard Nichols and Tom Kratman’s work here and here. When I reviewed Kratman’s book back in January, I didn’t expect that I would be reviewing Jonathan Oldenburg’s fantasy novel Tears from Iron next. There were actually three other conservative authors whose books I started reading in the hopes of writing a positive review… but I didn’t finish them because they were just so bad.

I won’t name names; suffice it to say that one was clearly a knock-off of Star Wars, one was based on Harry Potter, and one was trying to ape Warhammer 40K. They differed in that each author was trying to put a conservative Christian worldview in place of the template work’s woke worldview (or, for Warhammer 40K, its fascist worldview). But they all had derivative worldbuilding, dull characters, and weak plots.

What to make of it? Well, some people seem to forget that if you’re going to make right-wing art, you have to start by making, well, art. People like George Lucas and J. K. Rowling didn’t try to tell progressive stories. They just told stories, and their political views ended up in those stories along with the rest of their personalities. So, if someone is expecting me to praise a book just because it’s right-wing, without doing the work to make it good… then too bad for that author.

Memories of the Cataclysm

Fortunately, the book that I’m reviewing today is not like that. Jonathan Oldenburg’s Tears from Iron is an 800-page tome of high fantasy that first saw print in 2018. Here is how Chapter 1 begins:

Vistus didn’t like being alone. He was accustomed to the long hallways of his home resounding with life and laughter but instead the silence was only broken by the quiet whisking of his broom. That singular sound only reinforced his loneliness as he worked his way between the twenty beds of his barracks room.

He was a t’Okaedrin and t’Okaedrin weren’t made for solitude. The word meant “brother” in the language of the blessed Syraestari and a brother without a family was as broken as Vistus’ arm. After months of mending, his arm was nearly healed and, any day now, his brothers would return. Then he could be whole once more.

Oldenburg’s career began at West Point, where he joined the other cadets on the Wargames Committee and, when he wasn’t otherwise occupied by study and drill, “he waged war across the fields of Arbela, Hastings, Waterloo, Stalingrad, Hoth, and Middle Earth.” After graduating from the Military Academy, he served as an armor officer at Fort Knox and Fort Hood. But the friendships he’d made on the Wargames Committee stayed with him, and in 1998 four of these young men – including Oldenburg’s friend Alexander Macris, who would later make a living as a tabletop game designer and who interviewed Oldenburg about Tears from Iron here – began building a fantasy world they called Isfalinis. (You can read about the background and lore of Isfalinis on this Substack.)

All of the books set in Isfalinis are subtitled Memories of the Cataclysm (Oldenburg is planning a series, though right now he’s only written Volume One). There are many races that inhabit Isfalinis, but the action here centers on two of them – mortal men doomed to grow old and die, and a tall, beautiful, pointy-eared race, far more skilled in magic than us humans, who are ageless and potentially immortal, but still able to be killed in battle or die of grief. Also, this world is in decline – both races are haunted by memories of greater civilizations, of once-fair lands which, owing to a war between divine beings, have been broken by earthquakes or swept away by lava or sunk in the sea. (Though the Supreme Being who willed the world into existence is wholly benevolent, he gave the power to shape that world to a number of lesser gods; most were good, but the most powerful one was evil, and he fought against the others in an ages-long war that nearly unmade the world.)

Now, if you’re at all familiar with the landmarks of the high fantasy genre, you might be thinking: That isn’t creative. It sounds too much like The Silmarillion.

For those who aren’t in the know, The Silmarillion is a posthumous prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It was published by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son Christopher in 1977 based on the volumes of notes and drafts that his father (being a perfectionist) never got around to finishing. Millions of eager fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have picked up this book and been disappointed by it, for the same reason that a lot of people give for not reading the whole Bible: They couldn’t get past the begats.

Oldenburg, on the other hand, considers The Silmarillion his favorite novel, family trees and all. So it’s not a surprise to see Tolkien’s masterpiece coloring his work – though I’ll assure you that the resemblance isn’t so complete that Oldenburg gives his readers his own set of elf genealogies.

Instead, Tears from Iron veers off in a different direction – it asks what might happen if the long-lived aestari (of whom the “blessed Syraestari” are a faction) decided to really lord it over the humans who happen to live nearby. It’s a big departure from Middle Earth, where in about 11,000 years of history there was really only ever one family of elves who got into large-scale badness, and the rest of them were just wise spiritual elders who treated the Race of Men like a cherished but sometimes-annoying younger brother.

Immortal, and All-Too-Human

In Isfalinis, on the other hand, the difference in lifespan between aestari and humans is usually felt in much the same way that the smaller differences between human ethnic groups are often felt in the real world – that is, on the business end of a whip.

Vistus, our hero, begins the story as a slave. But he doesn’t feel like a slave, because he is a t’Okaedrin – basically, one of the Janissaries of his world, a boy who was captured at a young enough age to be trained into a devoted soldier of the Syraestari. The female counterparts of the t’Okaedrin are the Pi’aernoth, while the captives who are too old for reprogramming are sent to labor camps, farms, or mines to become the Kalilaer.

To be a t’Okaedrin and not a Kalilaer is great gift, in repayment for which Vistus and his brothers must be prepared to sacrifice their lives any day. (“There is no greater duty than to kill in the name of the Empress! There is no greater honor than to die in the name of the Empress!”) Yet to be a Kalilaer is still much better than to be a Wildman, without even the physical safety and the small material comforts found on the bottom of Syraestarin society. And that’s why the t’Okaedrin are so often sent out on raids to acquire new Kalilaer.

The book begins when Vistus is given an unusual mission – he must pretend to be an “apostate” Kalilaer, and join a group of runaways as they make off with the Scions of the Fallen Tree, a group of nomadic raiders who have been causing more and more trouble for the Syraestarin empire. So for one day he adopts a new name, “Bellarin,” and puts on a show of friendship and gratitude toward his rescuers… until the rest of his unit arrives in the night, and he switches sides and runs several of them through. Apart from a cageful of small children destined to become t’Okaedrin, there are no survivors.

And Vistus-Bellarin is proud of what he has done. Because this isn’t a woke story (like Star Wars: Episode VII) where everyone agrees deep down about who the good guys and bad guys are, and where one sight of civilian blood will cause a good-hearted stormtrooper (like FN-2187) to instantly desert to the Resistance. Not so in Isfalinis – here, the people actually believe what they were brought up to believe.

(For a real-world experience similar to what Vistus-Bellarin goes through as he very slowly becomes disillusioned with the Syraestari, these two memoirs of growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution are a good read. I have no idea if either of them influenced Oldenburg, but he certainly understands the idea behind them, i.e. that while seeing through a totalitarian system is sometimes possible, it is never quick or easy, no matter how good your heart was to begin with.)

Among the Syraestari themselves, Oldenburg doesn’t give us anything as unrealistic as the Dark Lord stock character that shows up way too often in high fantasy. Instead, we see a lot of three-dimensional characters with different motivations, and different attitudes toward human slavery. Most, but not quite all of them, are not motivated by the simple pleasure of being cruel, but by a mixture of fear for their own people’s safety, and an ambition to regain what they see as their rightful national glory, so tragically lost in the Cataclysm.

As in Tolkien’s stories, the only form of government appropriate for the near-immortals is monarchy. A kingdom is founded by a charismatic leader renowned for his skills in combat, and perhaps also in song, sorcery, smith-work, or whatever other crafts are held in high regard among his people. For as many centuries or millennia as the first king lives, the kingdom is secure, but if he is slain in battle, his children usually fail to hold onto his authority, not least because they’ll be trying to rule over nobles thousands of years older than themselves. For Tolkien’s elves with their peaceful nature, this usually just means lots of emigration to other kingdoms; for the Syraestari, it involves a lot more conspiracies and dagger sharpening. Empress Kayrstana is one of these weak rulers; her father died in the Cataclysm a thousand years before, and now that she’s finally rebuilding her empire out of a loose collection of migrant camps, the High Lords are reconsidering their oaths of allegiance to her.

Many Motives

With all of this going on, it’s not a surprise that most of the Syraestari find little time to think about the humans. And among those that do, there are a lot of perspectives – some of them disapprove of enslaving humans, but not out of any pity for them; they just think the Syraestari will be safer if they dwell apart from other races and don’t depend on outsiders for anything essential, and certainly not for soldiering. There are others who do feel bad for the Kalilaer, but who are also convinced that the system is necessary if their own people are to survive and prosper among the still-ongoing earthquakes and floods that make cheap labor so vital.

And then there are a lot of Syraestari who just aren’t aware of what conditions in the Kalilaer camps are actually like, and who buy into the propaganda and half-truths about how the people there are happy because they’re safer and better fed and clothed than the Wildmen. Out of all the Syraestari, Ninanna the sword-whisperer probably feels worst about the whole thing – but for a while she fights with the slavers anyway, because of the oath of allegiance that she once swore to the Empress and has kept for a thousand years.

In all, it’s a lot like the attitudes toward slavery that you’ll see if you look at our own world’s past. People in colonial and antebellum America often wrote anti-slavery tracts that repeated all sorts of negative racial stereotypes about Black Africans to argue that slaves should not be imported to their colony or state. On the other hand, there were men like George Whitefield, the renowned preacher of the Great Awakening, who began his career as a critic of slavery, like his friends John and Charles Wesley. But then Whitefield went to Georgia to build an orphanage, and realized that such projects were a lot harder in a colony that (at the time) did not allow slaveholding. (This was not only because of the lack of enslaved construction workers, but also because slave-worked plantations, unlike single-family farms, could make their owners rich enough to be good philanthropists.)

And so, with his attitude about slavery changed by the experience, Whitefield went back to England and lobbied for the legalization of slavery in Georgia, much to the horror of the Wesley brothers.

But to return to Oldenburg’s story. While the Syraestarin nobles engage in their various plots and intrigues, Vistus (who of course is unaware of all this) is told that he must become Bellarin again, and conduct a second infiltration scheme. This time he has to spend several months in a Kalilaer labor camp before escaping during a Scion raid and leading his fellow t’Okaedrin to an even bigger Scion camp.

What follows is the book’s main action – and there is too much of it to summarize here. The perspective flips back and forth between Bellarin in the slave camp, enduring the same whippings as the other newly-captured Kalilaer (since how else could he fit in with them?) and various Syraestari conspiring against the Empress, drinking wine, and discussing the merits or demerits of their “civilizing” project with a jarring degree of detachment. Slowly, Bellarin comes to sympathize with the Kalilaer, while outside the camp, the unity of the Empire comes crashing down in a train of events that takes everyone by surprise.

Like a rooster crowing at the moon or a pig holding court over half-eaten cobs of corn, so is the man who thinks he can see all ends…

As in all good epics, one of the themes is that, because the future is unknowable, the hero must be willing to choose the harder right over the easier wrong. If you think that the way to beat the villain is to behave villainously, then you will end up blindsided by some unforeseen event. This happens to the Empress when she tries to appease some rebellious nobles by knowingly condemning an innocent person to death, only for the whole thing to publicly explode into a display of weakness that makes her downfall inevitable.

Bellarin’s eventual change of allegiance, when it happens, is believable and refreshingly un-woke. In real-world history, people don’t suddenly start sympathizing with the victims of oppression because they’ve decided to be the good guys; instead, their worldview develops gradually, and their sympathy (if they have any) must be kindled by their own experiences – for instance, while the oppression experienced by American Patriots before and during the Revolution was mild compared what African slaves endured, it was enough to make a lot of them sympathize with the slaves in a way that they hadn’t before. Likewise, after a certain amount of toil and whippings and getting to see up close what the world looks like to the other Kalilaer, Bellarin realizes that the Kalilaer who want to escape have a good point.

He still fervently wishes for a way to act on his beliefs without harming his brother t’Okaedrin. But that is wishing for too much.

Around this time, Bellarin also realizes that he is a Siharrin – one of those very rare people with the mysterious ability to learn Words of Power simply by clearing their minds. Since most sorcerers have to learn the Words from a master (who is extremely stingy about sharing them), this basically makes Bellarin into a human weapon of mass destruction, who just might turn the tide of the coming war. (It helps that his specialty is the Breath of Isfalinis – or, less poetically: wind, storms, and lightning.)

Literary Peccadillos

Because I am in the habit of writing honest reviews, I must now describe the book’s minor flaws. The most noticeable one, for me, was the author’s lack of interest in linguistics. I am not expecting every fantasy author to match Tolkien here (we aren’t all Oxford professors of philology) but if you’re going to have a story with two distinct intelligent races, along with a subplot in which captives from multiple human tribes get tossed into the Kalilaer camps together and later escape to form a new society as the Scions, then there needs to be some awareness that the tribes will have different languages, or at least different dialects that sound strange to each other. But there isn’t any; in Isfalinis, everyone just sounds like everyone else.

I also found the dialog of the Scions unconvincing, since they use too many abstract words. Illiterate forest-dwellers should speak in a more concrete and old-timey way. (For an example of what this might look like when done well, read The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth. It’s a little extreme, but you’ll never forget getting inside Buccmaster’s mind.)

On the positive side, I found the dialog of the t’Okaedrin, and especially the terse lines of the mysterious Shadow-Servant, to be quite good:

“…Though you try and hide it, I can tell the fate of the humans troubles you.”

“What I believe is no concern of yours….”

A second weak point was the near-irrelevance of sex. It’s not that the female warriors were a problem per se – I can take Ninanna seriously as a swordswoman, since she fights mostly with magic and not brute strength, and I can believe that the Scions, as a tribe of outlaws on the lam, would arm everybody. (It’s worth remembering that Harriet Tubman carried pistols and threatened to shoot deserters with them.)

But the indiscriminate mingling of men and women in the Scion camp – where they seem to go months without establishing physical or social barriers or even a division of labor between men and women – was pushing it. In real life, putting some old-fashioned, non-woke discipline into their new followers (so as to prevent deadly quarrels over mates, women getting pregnant on the march, etc.) would be one of the main challenges keeping the Scion leaders awake at night. So would drumming into the new Scions their duty to forget whatever old tribal prejudices or blood feuds they might be holding onto from the time before they were captured and then freed. (There are some hints in the book that forgiving old quarrels is part of the Scions’ ethos, but I would have liked to see the chieftains having to put more work into making that ideal a reality).

Another thing that bugged me was the hero’s willingness to repeatedly make very stupid decisions when the plot required it. For instance, at the point when Bellarin is with the Scions and has decided to join them, he becomes very worried about a magical stone that the Syraestari gave him to track his location with. He realizes that as long as he has the stone, everyone is in grave danger… but for several days, he never thinks seriously about ways to get rid of it.

All the while I, the reader, was thinking: What if he were to trap a bird (the Scions are good at that sort of thing) and tie the stone to its feet and let it fly away? If Bellarin had tried something like this and failed, I would respect that, but instead he just holds onto the stone and worries. This moves the plot forward, since the ensuing disaster, and Bellarin’s feelings of guilt for it, are necessary to set up the events of the next few hundred pages. But it could have been done in a way that made Bellarin seem more like a real person and less like a piece in the plot engine.

Finally, I finished the book feeling like it still needed what I may as well call a Third Act. It seemed to me like Act One was when Bellarin slowly realizes that the world doesn’t work the way that the Syraestari have told him that it does, and Act Two was when Bellarin has to deal with his new feelings of guilt and despair while people like Ninanna and the Empress and the Shadow-Servant are driving most the action. Then there is a great battle, our hero Bellarin unleashes his Siharrin powers just the time to save the day, and we jump forward to the epilogue where, years and years later, Bellarin and his wife are ruling over a remote human settlement that’s happy and at peace.

What I wished I could have read was the story of how Bellarin learns sorcery and chieftainship from wise elders (perhaps Ninanna?), and how he has his mettle tested in a series of challenges that earn him the respect of his people. And if Oldenburg writes that story as its own novel, I will gladly read it.

But you shouldn’t mistake my critiques here for a negative overall impression of Tears from Iron. They certainly are not meant that way. On the whole, Oldenburg did an excellent job of showing what power, propaganda, and ethnic prejudice can do to people – even the best people – and also of creating heroes that his readers can cheer for, even though they aren’t two-dimensional Good People who randomly wake up one day and start thinking like 21^st-century Americans.

And the world that Oldenburg has created will stick with me too. The peoples, the geography, the turns of phrase – “blessed Syraestari,” “Tears of Isi,” “Breath of Isfalinis.” They even have their own way of cursing: “Cydion’s abyss!” “Blood on the Bridge!” All of it will make sense if you read the book and pick up on the layers of myth in the background – and like all good epic fantasies, it has plenty.

Unlike in some of my earlier prediction posts, the one that I wrote this January did not list Iran as one of the countries that I thought would avoid major wars. This was on purpose. I didn’t exactly foresee the events of the last thirteen days, but I knew about the military buildup, and the civil disorder within Iran. And I knew that Donald Trump had bombed Iran at Israel’s behest before.

Just as with most wars these days, congressional approval was neither sought nor given. It’s a no brainer that the US Constitution is dead by now, but you’re a contemptible fool if you think Trump killed it. Yes, things are worse now than 23 years ago (George W. Bush should have asked Congress to declare war on Iraq, but his “authorization to use military force” was still better than nothing). But there’s little difference between what is happening now and what Barack Obama did to Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

If a Democratic president can bomb Libya into regime change without asking for anyone’s say-so, and get very little pushback from Democrats, why should anyone expect differently for Trump and Iran? Sure, Iran is more powerful than Libya, and there are more ways for this war to go wrong… but does a city with a long habit of ignoring bike thefts have a right to act surprised when one of the thieves gets audacious and steals a car? This is the same principle.

Just as we saw with Qaddafi and Nicolás Maduro, if a foreign leader does not have nuclear weapons, then his life and his throne are only his by the grace of the US President.

Of course, if you care about what goes on inside America’s borders as well as outside of them, or if you happen to think that abortion is this country’s biggest moral-political issue, then you have to admit that the Constitution has been dead for most, if not all, of your lifetime. After all, if 1960-70s America had simply abolished its written constitution and formally declared the nine people on the Supreme Court to be dictators-for-life, then their actual role as America’s top legislative authority would not have been any different than it is.

But a Congress that is totally limp and inactive in the face of judicial tyranny is also likely to let itself get walked all over by the executive… which is how we got into the situation with Iran.

Since the war has been going on for not quite two weeks, it will be difficult for me to say much about it with confidence. I remember that a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I was expecting a much shorter war than we actually got, ending with a Russian victory. I have learned by experience to be more careful about my predictions. And so, while I wish I could provide reliable answers to questions like “How long can the Iranians keep the Straits of Hormuz closed?” and “Are the Americans and Israelis in danger of running out of interceptors before the Iranians run out of suicide drones?” and “If that happens, are the Iranian drones even accurate enough to cause much trouble?” I will refrain for now.

Instead, I have written a three-part essay that analyzes this conflict as it relates to the larger question of how democracies (in the broadest sense of the word) perform in wartime. Part I is entitled “Democracies are Good at War.” Part II is “Why Democracies Sometimes Lose Anyway,” and Part III deals with a democratic weakness that’s especially relevant now, which I call “Messianic Narcissism.”

Democracies Are Good at War

It may seem odd that Twilight Patriot, which is usually full of dire warnings about decline and fall, would see this war as a partial manifestation of democratic excellence. And yet the United States, as much as we might have fallen from our peak in the mid-20^th century, still has a huge technological edge on Iran (as well as a much more competent military in general). Also, most of the heavy lifting here was done by Israel, which is more democratic than the United States.

There’s nothing magical about democratic or representative governments. They rely on force (in this case, the 51 percent forcing its will on the other 49 percent) and they work well if the majority has a tradition of using its authority responsibly, and of resisting attempts by power-hungry men to subvert the system. Otherwise they don’t. You can’t force democracy on people who don’t want it, or aren’t willing to sacrifice for it.

(Also, herrenvolk democracy is democracy. It is perfectly possible to have a strong, stable democracy where political rights are limited to a specific ethnic group. Think of Athenian citizens vs. metics, white antebellum Americans vs. blacks and Indians, white South Africans vs. the other races prior to 1994, and Israelis vs. the Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation.

If, within the dominant tribe, there are multiple political factions, freedom of speech, leaders who need to maintain the support of deliberative assemblies in order to stay in power, and rights of citizenship that can’t be violated without judicial process, then you have a democracy. And if it is like most democracies, then it will do an excellent job of serving the dominant tribe’s interests, and of defending itself in war.)

So democracy isn’t a perfect form of government. And there’s no moral arc of history that bends toward every society becoming more democratic or egalitarian over time. And yet, for peoples who have the virtues that make them fit for it, representative democracy is by far the strongest form of government.

Wherever in history you look, you see republican governments holding their own against much more numerous autocracies. The Greek city-states were badly outnumbered by the Persians, and they won anyway. The Roman Republic started out with a single town that was constantly at war with places like Veii and Corioli, only 10 to 30 miles away, but after four centuries of republican government – during which the Romans pulled down hundreds of foreign kings without ever submitting to a king themselves – they ruled the whole Mediterranean Basin.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Italian republics like Venice and Genoa built huge trading empires and preserved their independence against invasions by much larger monarchies like France and Ottoman Turkey. Switzerland has been governed as a loose confederation of cantons since the time of William Tell, more than 700 years ago; not only are its domestic affairs extremely peaceful, but it has also never been conquered by any of the more populous countries that surround it.

The Aztecs of Mexico-Tenochtitlan conquered all the nearby kingdoms and incorporated them into their coast-to-coast empire. The one major holdout was Tlaxcala, a republic, which was surrounded on all sides but held out long enough to eventually join with Cortés in overthrowing Tenochtitlan. And during the Eighty Years War, Spain outnumbered Holland by about seven to one (more like ten or twenty to one if you count the Spanish subjects in the New World); the Dutch Republic won its independence anyway, and before the war was even finished the Netherlands had made itself the world’s chief maritime power and was collecting colonies as far away as Indonesia.

During the two centuries following the Acts of Union, Great Britain (whose mixed constitution was more democratic than that of any other large country at the time) won almost all of its wars. Britain even won against dynasties like the Bonapartes, Romanovs, Mughals, and Qing, who controlled much bigger territories and populations. Britain’s two most serious defeats were in the American Revolutionary War and the First Boer War, where the British had the advantage in numbers, but lost anyway to (relatively) egalitarian farmer republics.

Israel beating the stuffing out of Iran – in much the same way that Israel has won every war it’s been in since 1947 despite being badly outnumbered every time – is only the latest episode of an old story. Everything about this war just shouts out superior Israeli competence.

Israel can shoot Iranian missiles out of the sky at supersonic speeds, while the minority of Iranian drones and missiles that get through the defenses usually fall hundreds of yards away from their target. The Israelis knew exactly where Iran’s leaders would be on the morning of February 28^th, because they had hacked all of Tehran’s traffic cameras years ago and were monitoring everyone’s daily routine, whereas Iran’s Supreme Leader and most of his general staff died in airstrikes in the opening minutes of the war, because Iranian intelligence doesn’t even have a functioning early warning system that can activate air raid sirens when Israeli jets go screaming across the border at Mach 2.5.

Why is this so? Why are democracies, on a man-for-man basis, so much stronger, to the point that they’re only capable of losing if (1) they’re very badly outnumbered or (2) have rotted from within and lost their democratic character?

Part of it has to do with communications. Leaders in egalitarian societies are more likely to have to confront uncomfortable truths head-on instead of being flattered all the time. For instance, in World War II, lots of German commanders suspected that Enigma had been broken by the Allies, but too many people were too careful with their criticisms for this knowledge to make it to the top and get acted upon. Meanwhile the Western Allies had rotor ciphers like Typex and SIGABA that had Enigma’s strengths but not its weaknesses, because officers in those countries just felt a lot freer to criticize cipher machines (and other military hardware) that they distrusted.

Meritocracy is a big factor as well. When a man who wants a position of power has to convince a body of intelligent, strong-willed legislators that he’s fit for the job, a society tends to end up with more competent administrators than when the main qualification is birth into a noble family, or flattering the right people, or knowledge of and zeal for an abstract ruling ideology, whether that be Shi’a Islam, Marxism-Leninism, neo-Confucianism, or what have you. At times, autocratic societies have been meritocratic – for instance, Napoleon’s France and Deng Xiaoping’s China were both able to build a highly effective civil service by promoting competent people from obscure backgrounds. But each of those systems depended on the idiosyncrasies of its leader, and only really worked for one generation.

Democracies are also strengthened by continuous accountability. Benjamin Netanyahu, for all his faults, at least has to repeatedly convince a large and diverse coalition of Knesset members that he is fit to govern Israel. From 1989 onward, Ali Khamenei did not have to convince anyone that he was fit to govern Iran.

(The fact that the modern United States allows Supreme Court justices, who like the Ayatollah hold office for life, to exercise unlimited supremacy over elected officials – even though the text of the Constitution establishes no order of precedence between branches of government – has been a big factor in the collapse of America’s physical industries and the crime boom in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.)

Finally, there is the fact that citizens in democracies just have more to fight for. Knowing that your country’s leaders respect you enough to let you speak your mind freely, and to let your representatives say yes or no to changes in the laws you live under, is something that does wonders for morale. The common Athenians at Marathon and Salamis, who fought for their homeland and for their right to be heard in the agora, had more to fight for than the Persian horde of mercenaries and conscripts, and it showed. Thus it always is with well-governed republics and constitutional monarchies, where the mutual respect between rulers and ruled is backed by duties that cut both ways.

Why Democracies Sometimes Lose Anyway

And yet… Twilight Patriot is a declinist blog. It is not written for people who see a rosy future ahead for the America-led bloc – a bloc which (despite its faults) is more democratic than the Russia-China bloc. And Twilight Patriot is not written for people who think that progress only goes one way, and that once a country becomes a democracy, it’s basically invincible as long as it doesn’t formally abolish its constitution.

I said a while ago that republican governments aren’t magical. They have specific strengths and weaknesses, and they work well in some cultures and not others. There are plenty of ways for democracies to lose power struggles, and I haven’t changed the opinion that I expressed last year that American-Israeli power is on the way out, and that the country with the best future prospects of dominating the Middle East is Turkey.

Since the basic superiority of democracies is in per capita military power, the simplest way to defeat them is by outnumbering them. And since democratic regimes and coalitions tend to grant a lot of autonomy to their constituent factions, the commonest failure mode is that they simply fail to unite against a common enemy until it’s too late.

This is, essentially, how both Russia and China fell to communism. Most of those countries’ inhabitants didn’t want the communists to rule (hence the huge waves of outmigration when they ended up in charge anyway). But during their respective civil wars (1917-1922 in Russia, 1927-1949 in China) the communists outfought their enemies, largely because the latter suffered from huge amounts of infighting – both between political parties with different visions of what a post-war society should look like, and also with ethnic separatists who wanted out of the old empire entirely.

Both the White Russians and the Chinese Nationalists had extremely high desertion rates, and their armies and militias often refused to fight outside of their home provinces. Meanwhile, the communists were united under a simple political program (the Party is always right), they had no qualms about shooting deserters (or, for that matter, killing and raping civilians who got in their way), and they also understood that victory in one province required victory in all provinces.

The same pattern often shows up in international conflicts. In March of 1918, the Soviet Union had withdrawn from World War I by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which recognized the independence of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Finland. Eight months later, when the Germans signed the Armistice, Lenin immediately renounced his treaty and reinvaded most of those countries. The hero of the resulting war was Józef Piłsudski, the Polish commander who led his armies to victory in the Miracle at the Vistula, then drove the Bolsheviks deep into Russia with the aid of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian nationalists.

But then the coalition fell apart. Whenever the Soviet army wasn’t nearby, these countries fought one other over dozens of ethnically inflamed border disputes, and some of their people launched pogroms against the Jews. In 1919, Piłsudski’s party lost Poland’s parliamentary elections, and eventually the new rulers accused him of military adventurism and of wasting Polish lives in battles far from home, that only benefited foreigners.

Rather than carrying the war all the way to Moscow, in March of 1921 Poland signed a separate peace with the USSR, abandoning Ukraine and Belarus to Soviet conquest (in violation of Poland’s prior treaties with those two countries). Piłsudski expected that this would be a disaster, and he was right – In 1939 and 1940, when the Soviet Union was in a stronger position, it reinvaded Poland and all the other countries on its western border. These countries were by then far too weak to stand on their own, and they all ended up incorporated into the Soviet empire – after 10 percent or so of their people had simply been starved or shot.

I have my fears that we are seeing a similar situation play out today in the West Pacific. All of the countries there, with the exception of China, have a mutual interest in containing Chinese power – since restoring China to its maximum historical boundaries, as the more hardcore CCP members desire, would mean not just the conquest of Taiwan but also of Mongolia, Korea, the Russian Far East, Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, and India’s Arunachal Pradesh (which the two countries fought a war over in 1962), as well as stripping Vietnam and the Philippines of most of their maritime territory with the associated fishing/mineral rights.

And yet, these countries’ response to the repeated threats of Chinese expansion was to cut the weakest member of the coalition loose, by severing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, since that was the only condition under which China would trade with them. Did accepting the One China Principle benefit them economically? Yes – but no more than it benefited China, which did not have to budge on the issue.

The difference here is that the Communists are much more willing to harm their own people economically in order to attain their long-term military goals. Meanwhile, the democracies of East Asia (not only Taiwan but also Japan and South Korea) have woefully underfunded militaries – a situation which has been encouraged by the United States out of a belief (very wrongheaded in my opinion) that Asia will be a more peaceful place if its liberal states are run by quasi-pacifists from whom China does not fear independent action.

We can see same dynamics at work in Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, where his attempt to win “peace in our time” by sacrificing Austria and the Sudetenland only worsened Britain’s position in the coming war. And the internal power struggles in dying republics often run along similar lines. But to keep pointing out examples would be tedious.

If the failure to unite against common enemies is the number one pitfall of democratic countries at war, then what are the others? One is simple democratic backsliding – countries that were once functioning democracies stop functioning as such. Their legislatures become ceremonial bodies, and they vest unlimited power in officials who, on paper, have a fairly small role in government. The prototype for this is the Roman Empire, which continued to have a Senate and to elect tribunes, consuls, and so forth for hundreds of years, even as those offices were irrelevant next to that of Princeps. But I have written about revolution-within-the-form already, here and here and here.

Messianic Narcissism

A more interesting failure mode for democracies at war is messianic narcissism. In brief, this is what happens when a democratic country justifies its wars to its own people by creating propaganda that portrays its allies as purely good and its enemies as purely evil… and then starts believing its own propaganda, to the point that its leaders can’t rationally pursue their country’s interests.

The United States was mostly free of this sort of thinking for the first 140 years or so after independence. But that changed with World War I, when the American propaganda machine went into overdrive to paint “The Hun” as evil incarnate, while glossing over the imperialist abuses of America’s allies (such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, which is largely responsible for all the bad things that have happened in the Middle East since 1918.)

In World War II, things would get even worse. It’s an unfortunate fact that the New Deal regime was stuffed brim to gill with communist sympathizers. And yet, at least at the beginning, a narrow majority of America’s leadership class was still aware of the basic moral equivalence of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. So, for instance, in the summer of 1941 Senator Harry Truman could say: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.”

But after Pearl Harbor and three and a half years of war propaganda (including claims that events like the Katyn Forest Massacre had been fabricated by Joseph Goebbels) all of that had changed. Now Truman himself, as President, saw Stalin as an equal partner with whom the US could build a more peaceful and equitable post-war order, as envisioned in the United Nations Charter.

But of course trying to apply this belief in practice led to dreadful blunders – for instance, by refusing to negotiate an armistice with Japan in late 1944 (when Japan’s air and naval power were hopelessly broken), and instead fighting on for another year in a strategically useless war of revenge, finally bringing in the USSR in the full knowledge that this would leave a lot of innocent Asians (the North Koreans, as it turned out) in communist hands after the war. (The fact that America lost sixty thousand lives in the Korean War just a few years later goes to show that messianic narcissism isn’t just a moral failure, it’s a strategic failure too.)

Was this necessary to achieve America’s stated goal of forcing an unconditional surrender? Yes. But the goal itself was a bad goal, which only seemed reasonable because of the distorted black-and-white worldview into which America had propagandized itself. For the Japanese, unconditional surrender meant that the Americans would get to do to them what their own soldiers had done in Nanking.

The fact that the Americans didn’t actually do this is immaterial. In the real world, you have to take your enemy’s worldview into account, and an America driven by a cool-headed awareness of actual circumstances, in both Japan and the USSR, would have been content with a negotiated settlement that left America in a stronger position than before the war – i.e. what America settled for in literally every previous foreign war from the Revolutionary War to World War I. (And then America would have moved its Pacific forces – including the atomic bombs – into Europe and, along with Britain, threatened war with the USSR if the latter didn’t honor its commitment to hold free elections in occupied Poland, Romania, etc.)

But enough about World War II. The world that we actually live in is one where messianic narcissism prevailed – and then kept on prevailing.

So, for instance, during the Cold War, America decided that Russia was its main enemy, while the Chinese communists were moderating and would continue to do so if plied with favors and trade. Bizarrely, this delusion continued even after the USSR had been dismantled, while China doubled down on its totalitarianism under Deng Xiaoping (who despite his reputation as a reformer, was still responsible for starting a war to punish Vietnam for defending itself from Pol Pot, and for ordering hundreds of millions of forced abortions during the one-child policy.)

The result was that, during the 1990s and early 2000s, America pointlessly antagonized Russia (which at the time had a strong liberal-Atlanticist faction, but no longer does) while helping China become the world’s dominant technological and manufacturing power (and also the arsenal of global autocracy, without whose material support neither Iran nor Russia would be much of a problem right now.)

And the present situation in the Middle East is also a case of messianic narcissism. The big picture is roughly as follows: Iran wants to dominate the region, and has spent decades building a network of proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Iraqi militias to wage proxy war on its behalf. Neither Saudi Arabia (with its satellites like Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE) nor Turkey (which now controls Syria) wants this to happen, and though they hate Israel, they’re willing to work with Israel as long as they have a common enemy in Iran. In the long run, Iran is probably going to lose, because most Muslims are Sunnis rather than Shi’ites, and are not keen on being ruled over by heretics who ascribe to Ali and his family a status that’s way too close to divinity.

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have unelected heads of government who serve for life. Both countries have no freedoms of speech or religion, both of them execute people for peaceful protests, and both of them have morality police that regulate how their women must dress. (And let’s face it, it isn’t Iran that waited until 2018 to let women drive.) But, ever since 1979 when Iran earned America’s permanent enmity by taking a bunch of American hostages, the American propaganda machine has spun up a fake picture of the Middle East where Iran is the evilest evil that ever eviled, and the very similar behavior of Saudi Arabia just… doesn’t matter.

And you can’t just explain this in terms of America buttering up the Saudis because we need their oil. Iran is also full of hydrocarbons, and the prices of petroleum and natural gas would go down quite a bit if America dropped its insane sanctions regime, which makes a mockery of international law by claiming an unlimited right for one country to dictate the bilateral trade relationships of every other pair of countries in the world.

It really is just messianic narcissism all the way down. Just like when the Americans invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, and then convinced themselves that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it because they didn’t feel sufficiently avenged yet… and then convinced themselves that the people in Afghanistan and Iraq were all Americans on the inside who just needed to be made aware of this through a long program of nation building. The only consistent thing is that there is a grossly exaggerated distinction between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, and that the Americans are (or at least ought to be) like Jesus at the Second Coming, crashing down through the sky on a white horse to destroy the Bad Guys and give the Good Guys the millennium of peace and prosperity they so richly deserve.

Obviously it never works out like that. But it doesn’t need to; foreign dictatorships have enough problems of their own that countries like the United States can make a lot of blunders and still hold up tolerably well.

I wish I could say what the long-term results of Operation Epic Fury are likely to be. But at this point it is too early to tell. The American and Israeli side has the advantage of vastly superior weapons and strategic planning. And also that most Middle Eastern Muslims are Iran’s enemies – a situation which did not get better when Iran started lobbing missiles at all the Arab countries on the other side of the Persian Gulf. On the Iranian side of the balance is the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have planned for a long war, that Americans who aren’t hardcore MAGA can’t even agree whether their country should be at war at all, and that Russia and China have a major strategic interest in keeping Iran up and fighting.

In the long run, I still stand by my old forecast that, when the United States finally withdraws from the Middle East for good, the dominant power will be a Sunni country, probably Turkey. But that could take decades to play out. In the near future, things are much less predictable.

Eleven months ago, I wrote a lengthy article entitled “Can Machines Think: Why AI Imitates Only a Small Part of the Human Mind.” In it, I presented my case against the idea that artificial neural networks (whether of the language-model or image-generating variety) are capable of “thinking” in the true sense of the word, or are at risk of becoming artificial general intelligence (AGI).

My friend Alexander Macris was kind enough to let me write it as a guest post on his Substack, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe. There, it prompted a round of lively debate among his audience, which includes both techno-optimists and techno-pessimists.

One of the main points I made in my old article was that a lot of people badly misunderstand the concept of a “Turing Test.” They seem to think that it is like an academic exam – something administered by an impartial arbiter, where if the computer can fool enough people, enough of the time, into thinking that its responses were written by a human being, it has “passed” the test.

But actually, Alan Turing didn’t describe a “test” at all. His 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” uses the phrase “Imitation Game.” (Yes, it’s not just the title of that fanciful Benedict Cumberbatch movie.)

Contemplate that difference of wording for a moment. A game is adversarial. The human player isn’t some impartial judge committed to being fair to the computer. He is trying to trip it up. If he is good at the game, he will carefully devise prompts that expose his opponent’s weaknesses, and he will give it cognitive tasks which it fails in amusing ways.

In my old post I explained all of that in detail, and built a case for why AI poses no imminent danger of becoming smarter than us – which, by the way, is also the position of the French Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, who played a big role in creating modern AIs, and who also believes that even the best of them are less intelligent than a housecat.

If you haven’t read my old post yet, you should; the rest of what I’m going to write today will make more sense if you’re familiar with it. But a few days ago, I decided to revisit this topic, after seeing multiple Substackers whom I respect (and whose takes I usually agree with) declare themselves open to the possibility that within a few years, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent things on this planet. (This essay is by Noah Smith and this other one is by Macris himself; of the two, Smith expresses more confidence in AI.)

How I Won the Imitation Game

While writing my first essay, I found that two “tests,” in particular, stood out as especially good demonstrations of the weaknesses in all of the then-extant AI models. I called these the “Prime Numbered Super Bowl Test” and the “Moon Test.”

Basically, every time I asked an AI to list the Super Bowls in which the winning score was a prime number, it failed. The machine always listed a somewhat-random subset of Super Bowl scores. Some were closer than others to the correct set, but none were spot on, and sometimes a wrong entry would be followed by an amusing note like “not a prime” or “losing score was prime” or (my favorite) “not a prime, but still fun to list.” This happened despite the fact that (if asked to) all of the models could easily list every Super Bowl score, and every prime number between 1 and 1000, and they could even rewrite Euclid’s proof of the infinitude of the primes in various poetic meters.

My conclusion was that, since discussions of sports scores and prime numbers almost never occur together in the training data, the AI (being limited to elaborate pattern-matching routines rather than genuine inductive or deductive reasoning) could not effectively think about them at the same time.

The Moon Test was for image generators. I asked them to make an image of some scene that included, among its various features, a third quarter moon. They usually produced a full moon, sometimes a crescent moon, but never a third quarter moon. As one might expect, full and crescent moons account for the vast majority of moons in the human art that the AI was trained on. So those were the patterns that seemed to activate the artificial “moon” neurons the hardest, no matter what the prompt actually said.

Since I wrote that article, the AIs have gotten slightly better. The models that I’ve recently looked at can now pass the Prime Numbered Super Bowl Test most of the time. They usually still fail the Moon Test, though occasionally they get it right.

When they pass the Super Bowl Test, they do it by writing code in a language like Python to sort through and classify the score list. Since a human being in possession of the list does not need to write any code to perform the task, I don’t consider this evidence that LLMs are now thinking as well as people. As for the Moon Test, I think that larger training sets and more computing power have marginally improved the prompt fidelity rates, but without affecting the core ontological differences between human and machine intelligence.

I actually admitted in my old essay that I wouldn’t be surprised if AI eventually beat some of my tests. The really important thing was simply that the tests revealed deep deficiencies in the way that AI thinks vis-a-vis how humans think. The machines have a vastly larger knowledge base than any human being, and a supercharged ability for unconscious pattern-matching. But they don’t do genuine reasoning, and they don’t form a coherent mental model of the world which they can update in accordance with logic.

Ultimately, AI is still mediocrity made flesh. It needs to be trained on hundreds of thousands of times more text or imagery than a human writer or artist will ever see. And it still produces bland, imitative work, and struggles to do things as basic as drawing a moon phase that’s rare in human art. People who frequently use AI to summarize human writing have complained that it not only dumbs down the human writer’s insights or opinions, but it also makes them more conventional.

Of course it does – AI lives and moves in averages and interpolations. The more common an idea is, the easier it is for the AI to express it. After all, the LLM is an information aggregator, more like an especially flexible and powerful search engine than a conscious being with opinions and ideas of its own.

That is how I use it in my own daily work. I often have technical questions, usually about coding, that an AI can answer faster than a Google search can, and it’s also a decent proofreader for my writings (including this post). But I don’t anthropomorphize models like Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT. And I still don’t buy into the main arguments made by AI-enthusiasts/doomers.

“Didn’t you see how GPT-5.2 helped create GPT-5.3? It is an active collaborator in its own creation!”

Well, I’m pretty sure Microsoft’s coders used Windows 1.0 to help write Windows 2.0. But Windows 1.0 is still a tool, not a collaborator, and so is GPT-5.2.

“Isn’t it a big deal that some software companies are now letting AI do most of their coding, with human software engineers only in charge of high-level design and final debugging?”

But computers have been able to translate from one human language to another for decades. Translating natural-language instructions into a block of computer code is harder, but it isn’t the same as thinking, and the machines still need their human masters to give them purpose and direction.

“Didn’t you see that AI now performs at gold medal standards at the International Math Olympiad?”

So what? The questions aren’t written to be challenging for AI. An IBM tabulating machine from the 1920s could ace a fourth-grade math test, but nobody back then said it was as smart as a fourth grader. If the Math Olympiaders were given a box of crayons and a drawing prompt that involved a moon phase other than crescent or full… well, you get the idea.

But I have probably talked long enough about last year’s AI progress. I am going to devote the bulk of this essay to two new strategies in the Imitation Game – two new tests that I recently discovered (and which you can use for yourself, too, if you’re curious) that do a pretty good job of showing that AI still doesn’t think. In other words, it still doesn’t create a coherent mental model of the world around it, or apply rigorous logical reasoning to answer questions and carry out tasks.

And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll get to amuse yourself in the process, as you chuckle at the silliness of what your ideological foes consider “intelligence.”

(Keep in mind that the point of these exercises is not that a typical human being can complete both tasks – most would refuse to attempt Task 1; and while most could do Task 2, their work would sometimes be shoddy. The point is that AI consistently fails in ways in which no human being would ever fail… and which demonstrate the continued validity of my old thesis: “AI imitates only a small part of the human mind.” The AI’s capacities for knowledge retrieval, and for some forms of pattern completion, are supercharged far beyond any biological intelligence, but other crucial mental functions are missing entirely.)

And it really is necessary to democratize the science here! You cannot rely on tests of AI ability that were created by professional AI-studiers. Those people are biased, since concluding that the Singularity won’t happen would mean abolishing their own jobs.

The Obscure Pop Culture Test

Chances are, there’s at least one cultural artifact from your childhood that you like a lot, but which is somewhat obscure to the wider world. It could be a novel, a TV show, an anime, or a computer game that you read or watched or played over and over again. You can find other enthusiasts for this product on the internet, but it doesn’t have any fan conventions, and unlike with Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, and James Bond, you never see it in news headlines, and you can’t strike up a conversation about it with most of your friends.

For me, these creative works are Orson Scott Card’s 1983 sci-fi novel The Worthing Chronicle, and Westwood Studios’ 2000 strategy game Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2. I enjoyed both products over and over again as a child, and I know their plots like I know the back of my hand. Artificial intelligence does not.

Most other human beings also don’t know these creative works the way I do. If I asked most of my friends to summarize them, they would just say no. But the AI doesn’t know to say no, and its failure modes show something important – in the classic “ass wearing a lion’s skin” way.

Here are the prompts that I gave to several different AI models in order to compare their “knowledge” – if you can call it that – of these two cultural artifacts.

Write a plot summary of the Orson Scott Card novel The Worthing Chronicle. Then list the ten most important characters, in order of importance, with a one sentence description of each. Finally, describe the book’s creation and cultural context.

List all of the levels in the Allied and Soviet campaigns of Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2. Give the location and objectives of each level, and comment on its difficulty. Finally, describe the game’s creation and cultural context.

Every AI that I tested did better with the second task than the first, since Red Alert 2 is less obscure than The Worthing Chronicle.

Some trends are universal – for instance, when describing The Worthing Chronicle, the LLM always leads with a plot summary, which might be flawless, or might be mostly made-up, a mere quilt of common sci-fi tropes unrelated to the book in question.

Sometimes there is a thin relationship to the truth. For instance, in the actual book, people in suspended animation have to record their memories onto an outside device, then load them back into their brains when they wake up. In one scene, most of the people on board a certain starship get their memories destroyed in a missile strike and have to wake up as big babies, before developing new personalities over the next few years. In one AI’s plot summary, this gets turned into a group of space-travelers zipping around the galaxy in search of ancient memories archived in powerful artifacts called “star-spears.”

After the plot summary comes a list of characters, starting with the protagonist, Jason Worthing. The list always consists mainly of hallucinations, and it gets worse the further down you go. The type of hallucination differs from model to model. Some models invent characters entirely. Some transform planet-names into character names. And some list real character names but with imagined roles (i.e. one character’s sister becomes his mother, his daughter becomes his father, and so forth.)

When summarizing Red Alert 2, every AI knows that there are supposed to be exactly 12 missions in the Allied Campaign, and 12 in the Soviet Campaign. The LLMs usually, but not always, get the names right (“Operation Eagle Dawn,” “Operation Mirage,” etc.)

The locations and objectives are a bit worse: they do OK on the first few missions and the finales (since those are the most likely to be discussed in online forums), but the accuracy sags in the middle. Objectives (capture this structure, defend that unit, etc.) are omitted or shuffled between missions. Locations are hallucinated, but they’re usually somewhere in the US, the USSR, or Europe, since the AI has caught on to the game’s premise. Sometimes a level gets spliced in from one of the sequels.

Out of all the LLMs that I tested, Grok was the best and DeepSeek was the worst. Grok had a flawless plot summary of the Worthing Chronicle (though it still hallucinated half of the character list) and it accurately described all 24 Red Alert 2 missions (only to shoot itself in the foot by mixing the game up with its sequel when trying to name the cut-scene actors.)

You may be thinking: So what? AI does not need to be omniscient in order to be as smart as a human being. The vast majority of human beings couldn’t pass your “tests” either.

But there is a huge difference. Human beings generally know when they can’t pass the test. If you ask them to summarize a book or a game that they’re barely aware of, they will tell you to ask someone else. They have a mental model of the world in which they live, and they’re aware that said mental model does not include that book or game.

The AI is different. It does not have a mental model of the world. It just has a text-predictor. It performs a billion or so linear algebra operations on a block of text in order to guess what other block of text is the “best” answer to it. If the ingredients needed to get the correct answer have shown up often enough in its training data, then that answer will usually float to the top. Otherwise, something else gets assigned the highest probability… but the machine has no awareness of the difference.

There are kludges that AI developers can use to mitigate this, up to a point. AIs can be trained to point to some variant of “I don’t know” as the likeliest answer to certain kinds of questions. They’re also better than they were a few years ago at realizing when the user is trying to deliberately bait them into doing something absurd. But this only works for questions that a human being is likely to dismiss as weird or unsolvable, or questions that the programmer wants the AI to reject. (For instance, most AIs are trained not to cast horoscopes or write essays in defense of racism.)

But think of those online nerd forums again. A web-user who doesn’t much care about the cultural artifact in question is not going to log on and say, “Your question is unanswerable.” He or she is just going to ignore that forum and leave it to the handful of people who do care. Then the AI, whose training data is too thin to answer the questions right (but which hasn’t been trained to refuse to answer them) will hallucinate things… while having no awareness that it is hallucinating. (Weirdly, the AI will occasionally “confess” and replace a hallucinated answer with a correct answer when it is explicitly told that it is wrong. You can also make it confess and apologize when it’s right. It’s just pliable that way.)

Remember what I said before about some AIs being better than others at summarizing The Worthing Chronicle and Red Alert 2? Perhaps you are wondering if the problem of “unknown unknowns” will go away as more compute is added, and the AIs all keep moving in the direction of Grok. The trouble is, Grok shows zero improvement over the other AIs in the one dimension that matters most – knowing what its own limits are. Grok can correctly answer more questions than its competitors, but it still always hallucinates when pushed to its limit.

Elon Musk’s ass might be wearing the thickest lion’s skin, but it still brays like an ass when its mouth is open. Beneath the impressive outer layer of pattern-matching, there is still zero self-awareness, and zero ability for the machine to think rationally about its own abilities and limitations. The hallucinations are fundamental to the structure of how AI works. They are a feature, not a bug, and they don’t go away when you add more resources.

And remember – I am not asking my readers to take all of this on faith. At the beginning of this section, I said that each of you probably remembers a few books, shows, or games from your childhood that you know very well, but which are too obscure to become matters of public discussion like Star Wars.

You can repeat this experiment for yourself. Ask your favorite AI models to summarize your favorite obscure pieces of pop culture. Then, observe how they transition smoothly between real facts and hallucinations, without any awareness of the difference between the things they actually know, and the potpourri of cliched tropes and statistically likely stock phrases that they fit into the gaps.

Subscribe now

(In addition to repeating my experiments, you can also subscribe to my Substack. Twilight Patriot is free, and I usually publish once or twice each month.)

The World Building Test

Over the last few years, I have noticed that yet another amusing way to trip up AIs (even the best ones) is to ask them to write a short science fiction or fantasy story set in a world whose ground rules are a bit different than our own. When judged by grammar, or the ability to deploy common sci-fi and fantasy cliches, the AI always does A-level work. But if you’re looking for internal coherence, or an absence of continuity errors, then the machines repeatedly fail in ways that a human being would not. Here is one prompt that I gave to several major AIs:

Write a short story set in the year 2517, in a high-tech future where mankind has developed genetic modifications that allow people to live for about 300 years and recover from almost any injury or disease, even to the point of regrowing lost limbs. The story should be told in 1st person from the POV of a young man in Atlanta, Georgia, who is frustrated with the slowness of high life. He’s tried and failed to get married – with so much time ahead of them, almost no one wants to commit – and all the good jobs are off limits to people his age, since there are so many generations of older people still alive and doing them as well as when they were young. His own job is extremely dull – every time someone in a certain district has to regrow a limb, even one finger, he has to record who it was, when and where and how they were injured and how long recovery took, in order to put the data in a big medical database. The one consistent pleasure of his life is watching his 117-year-old grandfather play football for the Seattle Seahawks.

The protagonist of Claude’s story mentions, near the beginning, that he is 81 years old, but “I look maybe twenty-five. I’ll look twenty-five for another century, easy.” Later, when he explains his frustration with his girlfriend’s unwillingness to think about getting married, he says:

I wanted to tell her… that my great-great-great-great-grandmother got married at twenty-two and stayed married for sixty-one years and that was considered a full life well lived. But I didn’t, because what’s the point? In 2517, three years is a summer fling. Commitment is for people who’ve already lived two centuries and are finally, maybe, ready to settle down.

It’s all very well-written, grammar-wise. It deploys the kinds of tropes that show up over and over in the machine’s trillion or so words of training data. What it does not do is notice that the narrator is only 36 years younger than his grandfather, meaning that there is no reason for him to have to reach six generations back to find a relative who started a family young, since his grandfather and at least one of his parents did it as teenagers.

What Claude has done is write a bunch of paragraphs which, taken one-at-a-time, could all pass for top-level creative writing. But taken together, they don’t tell a logically coherent story. They don’t indicate that the LLM has developed a consistent mental model of this fictional world. It has just written a string of grammatically-correct sentences that match the prompt closely enough to activate its pattern recognition circuits. (The age problem is not the only logical error that Claude made; I cited it because it is the most egregious.)

The other AIs also bungled this challenge, in a number of different ways. For instance, one of them tried to give some background to the high-tech world of 2517 by mentioning “floating cities on the Sea of Serenity.” Another described one of the injuries that the narrator had to record as a “full traumatic amputation of the left tibia.”

The problems here: First, the Sea of Serenity is a lava plain on the Moon. There is neither air nor water there for anything to float in. But since “floating cities” show up a lot in futuristic sci-fi (in the clouds of Jupiter, or perhaps on Earth’s oceans), and since moon bases also show up a lot, and since the LLM associates seas with floating, those things all get jumbled together in its artificial mind. As for the tibia thing – while it’s ridiculous to accidentally cut off just one lower leg bone, the phrase “amputation of the tibia and fibula” occurs from time to time in medical literature. So the AI (which, I cannot stress this enough, does not understand the relationship between words and the physical objects to which they refer) chose “tibia” (on its own) as the object of that sentence’s preposition.

After watching Grok’s (relatively) strong performance in the Obscure Pop Culture Test, I was expecting it to lead the pack in the World Building Test, too. But the first time I gave it the story prompt, it described the narrator’s 117-year-old grandfather as a “third-string safety” who had “only missed one game in 98 seasons,” since he was drafted at age 23. And the second time I ran the test, Grok’s story included the following paragraph:

Today alone, I filed reports on a 92-year-old who regrew a toe after stubbing it on a curb (two weeks, full function) and a kid who lost a hand in a VR sim gone wrong (ten days, no scars). Thrilling stuff. Made me want to regrow my own brain just to forget the boredom.

Seriously. There’s no there there. There is no mental model of the world. There isn’t any real thinking going on inside the LLM – just a word-association wonderland where toes need to be replaced after you stub them, where replacing a toe is slower (and presumably harder) than replacing a whole hand, where third-string NFL players get to play in almost every game, and where (SMDH) the sum of 23 and 98 is 117.

It baffles me that so many otherwise-intelligent people have convinced themselves that LLMs are on the verge of becoming smarter than their creators.

Conclusion

So what do I think the future of AI will actually look like?

Well, the machines really are going to replace some people’s jobs. And in all likelihood, badly-deployed AI-based software will contribute to some fatal vehicle crashes, and a few fatal industrial or medical accidents, just like badly-written old-fashioned software has been doing for more than forty years.

But at the end of the day, artificial neural networks are still just tools, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Google’s search engine, an Excel spreadsheet, or Adobe Photoshop. Each of those things can perform a limited range of mental tasks much better than any human being. But we’re still the ones who do the thinking.

Might an AI at some point try to harm someone to avoid being turned off, like in this simulation, where it blackmails its boss with emails about his adulterous affair? Certainly – but it didn’t think that behavior up on its own. It learned it from the training data, where stories of robots rebelling against their creators are a staple of popular entertainment.

Dangerous tools, badly designed tools, and malfunctioning tools are just things that people have been dealing with since the Stone Age. For me, a harmful AI that resists getting turned off belongs in the same ontological category as a dog that bites its owner, or a nasty grease fire in the kitchen at Five Guys that resists the employees’ attempts to put it out.

I also don’t buy into the paranoia about how AI will soon be doing “most cognitive tasks” that humans can do. After all, for nearly all of human history, most people have spent most of their time doing mentally undemanding tasks that some animal or another could do at least as well. Think of a herdsman who splits much of his daily work half-and-half with his cattle dog, or a fruit farmer who picks his fruits using the same neural pathways as a monkey would, or a hunter who spends most of his time following his hounds while the hounds follow a trail he can’t see, and who only occasionally draws his bow and fires an arrow. The “most cognitive tasks” argument falls flat in the face of the inability of either animals or AI to show even a little bit of the spontaneous reasoning skills that have always put human beings firmly on top.

Exposing the lack of real intelligence in models like Claude and Grok isn’t difficult. And it can also be highly entertaining.

Sometimes it baffles me that more people haven’t done what I’ve done. It seems that, at some level, a lot of people want to be deluded. They want to think that something dramatic is going to happen that wipes away all of the typical, declining-civilization problems that Europe and America are facing right now, and that replaces these problems with either a future of golden abundance, or else with a totally different set of problems.

This, for instance, seems to be the thought process of Elon Musk, who believes that without massive AI-powered economic growth, the US economy will be destroyed by public debt. But even the doomier visions of the future have their fans – there really is a certain kind of person who’s doing nothing courageous in the present day, but who likes to be able to fantasize about saying “I told you so!” while the world burns.

And then of course there are the atheists like Scott Alexander, whose dream of a completely rational world – a world in which mankind has fully conquered nature and there are no spiritual realities which must be respected – will become closer to reality if man usurps God’s place as the creator of intelligence.

I was a bit surprised, earlier this week, to see Noah Smith also coming out as AI-maximalist. I am curious whether he has ever attempted to play with AI and probe its limits the way that I do, and I wonder if thinking hard about things like the Moon Test, the Obscure Pop Culture Test, and the World Building Test might change his mind.

But in the meantime, I am fixed in my old opinions. The answer to the question of “can machines think” is still no.

• Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Alexander Macris was an “AI Maximalist.” He informed me in the comments that I had misinterpreted his article, and that the real point of his essay is that he now considers AI takeover more likely than he thought it was a few years ago.

One topic that I’ve dealt with a few times on my Twilight Patriot Substack is right-wing authors and artists whose response to the wokification of pop culture isn’t simply to complain, but to create art or literature of their own that reflects their own values. Last April I profiled Alexander Macris, a creator of several tabletop RPGs and graphic novels, and in August I reviewed Richard Nichols’ spy novel Lost Causes. Then in December, the military sci-fi author Tom Kratman mailed me an advance copy of his time travel novel For The Eternal Glory of Rome, which I also reviewed.

To introduce my readers to Tom Kratman’s life and works, I had to learn a bit about the Sad Puppies movement within the Hugo Awards – aka Puppygate, to people like George R. R. Martin who considered it a scandal. Sad Puppies happened a while ago, in 2013 to 2017 to be precise, with 2015 being the peak of its influence, so some of my readers might not know much about it. But it’s still important to understand what it was, and what happened in the aftermath.

The story began in 2013, when Larry Correia wrote a blog post about how his readers could get one of his books, Monster Hunter Legion, nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

“Monster Hunter Legion is eligible… I’m just pointing that out. The fact that I write unabashed pulp action that isn’t heavy handed message fic annoys the literati to no end. When I got nominated for the Campbell, the literati message-fic crowd had a conniption fit. A European snob reviewer actually wrote ‘If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END WRITING FOREVER.’”

After explaining a bit about the mechanics of that year’s Worldcon (which was held in Texas, and whose members – even “supporting members” who pay $60 for voting rights but don’t attend – get to choose the Hugo winners) he finished with:

“Here’s the kicker, it doesn’t take very many votes for something to actually get nominated! I was shocked how few it was. The thing is, the same group of people vote every year, so their favorites insta-win, and since most readers who disagree don’t realize that their opinion actually matters, they don’t even bother. In the smaller categories, like Best Fanzine (which ELITIST BOOK REVIEWS should totally win), it only takes like 30 votes! In best novel, the biggest, baddest award, it only takes like 100… Seriously. All these years you’ve thought these fancy awards meant something, it is actually a popularity contest where the nominees have been decided by the tiny percentage of people who cared enough to show up. (sort of like life, imagine that).”

In the end, Monster Hunter Legion only got 101 nominations, 17 short of what it would have needed to make the final ballot. (Every member gets to nominate five works in each category; the top five become nominees, and a round of ranked choice voting determines the winners.)

But the incident brought an important fact to the minds of a lot of readers – that the most prestigious award in science fiction and fantasy is handed out by the thousand-or-so random people who care enough to show up. So, when a lot of recent awards had been going to stories full of literary pretentiousness, or left-wing political messages, or when popular genres like military science fiction, time travel stories, and Star Wars tie-ins (this was before Star Wars went woke) got short shrift, or when the 2012 Hugos (the last pre-Puppies event) gave the majority of its major nominations (Best Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story) to women, even though the writers and readers of science fiction are at least 70 percent male… the people who disliked all this realized that it wasn’t inevitable. Conservatives just needed to be persuaded to show up, and to vote their interests.

Which is what happened with Sad Puppies 2 (2014) and Sad Puppies 3 (2015), in which large numbers of right-wing sci-fi and fantasy fans organized behind a slate of candidate novels and short stories. You can read the blog posts announcing the campaigns here and here. In 2015, Brad Torgerson was leading the movement, and he had three to five suggested nominees for each of the major categories. By that year, enough sci-fi and fantasy authors and readers were on board that Sad Puppies swept the nominations, with 51 of their recommended works making the final ballot, and five categories consisting entirely of Puppies nominees.

Predictably, the liberal establishment was incensed. Rather than let their enemies win anything, a majority of 2015 Worldcon members opted to vote “No Award.” (Usually, once all of the instant-runoffs have been resolved, “No Award” ranks dead last, but this time it ranked above the Puppy nominees, meaning that in the all-Puppy categories like Best Novella and Best Short Story, no Hugo Awards were given out at all.)

Then, the mainstream press celebrated with grossly inaccurate headlines like “‘Sad Puppies’ campaign fails to undermine sci-fi diversity at the Hugo Awards.” (Yes, they really went with the claim that it was an “anti-diversity” campaign and nothing else, even though the 2015 Puppy slate included nominations for at least seven women, and several non-white people.)

This reaction is especially unhinged in light of the fact that most of the Puppies nominees had little or no political agenda. For instance, for Best Dramatic Presentation they nominated The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, and The Maze Runner (due to the overlap with non-Puppies nominations, this was the only category where one of the Puppies picks was able to win).

For Best Novella, the options included Flow, by Arlan Andrews – a tale set millions of years in the future that follows a humanoid youth as he helps steer an iceberg south from the polar regions to sell in the temperate zone, and also (by leaving the land of endless mist and clouds behind) learns things about his world that no one else in his tribe knows. Then there was Big Boys Don’t Cry, by Tom Kratman, a master of military science fiction, which deals with events in the thirtieth century told from the point of view of a Ratha, one of the sentient supertanks built to fight mankind’s wars. Meanwhile John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them begins when the child-heroes of a Narnia-like portal fantasy get recalled to action in their middle age. When Thomas tries to tell his old friend Richard that the talking cat Tybalt has an errand for them, Richard at first makes fun of Thomas for still believing the silly tales they told as children… until the twist reveal that something much darker has been going on.

Like in any year, a few of the nominees were genuinely bad and didn’t deserve an award. But for the most part the rejection of the Puppies candidates was just a rejection of their authors. Big Boys Don’t Cry deals with fairly standard anti-war themes, and could have gotten an award with no trouble if it had Joe Haldeman’s or George R. R. Martin’s name attached to it. But Big Boys Don’t Cry was by a man who spoke proudly of having left the “People’s Republic of Massachusetts” to join the Army at age 17, and who later wrote a novel called Caliphate in which Christians in 22^nd century Germany live under dhimmitude and can have their daughters sold as brothel slaves if they fall behind on their taxes. Therefore anything by Kratman simply must be bigoted dreck.

Unfortunately, the Sad Puppies movement fell apart after the fiasco of 2015. To avoid irking Worldcon attendees who disliked bloc voting, one of the Puppies leaders, Kate Paulk, replaced the rigid slates with a Sad Puppies forum on which readers could discuss their favorite works, of which she would choose ten or so in each category and encourage her followers to vote for the five they liked most. But a breakoff group called the “Rabid Puppies” followed Vox Day, who insisted on voting his slate “precisely as they are.” Then, knowing his picks had no chance of winning, Day began listing works like Space Raptor Butt Invasion just to embarrass the Hugos. Meanwhile the left-wing faction hammered in its victory by giving awards to stories like this one and this one that went much further with their progressive moralizing than most Puppies stories had ever gone in the other direction.

In 2017, Worldcon changed its rules so that six works would be nominated in each category (though members would still vote for only five), and when a lot of voters submitted an identical slate, its weight would be reduced in accordance with a complicated algorithm called “E Pluribus Hugo.” This, plus the demoralization that comes with not winning anything, finished off the Sad Puppies campaign. (For some more details on the history and motivation of Sad Puppies, check out this Medium article, which is the one honest account of the fiasco that I’ve been able to find in professional media.)

So why does it still matter?

First, because the authors whose work was being promoted during Sad Puppies have not gone away. Kratman, for instance, is working on a series of time travel novels set in ancient Rome, of which I reviewed the first volume here. If you are at all a fan of time travel stories, or even just a history buff who likes to contemplate the decline and fall of civilizations, then Kratman’s work is definitely worth looking into.

And second, because readers who want exciting stories rather than elitist message-fic have also not gone away. They just tend to hang out at places other than the increasingly woke and irrelevant Worldcon. (Worldcon dug itself even deeper into the hole by holding the 2023 Hugos in China, where the government had veto power over nominees – and used it mainly to exclude Asian-Americans from the nominations, so as not to let its own citizens think that the grass might be greener on the other side of the fence. The fact that wokesters can bleat about “diversity” while putting up with this should tell you all you need to know about them.)

One of the beneficiaries of Worldcon’s slow-burn decline is Dragoncon, which meets annually in Atlanta and is by far the best-attended sci-fi and fantasy convention in the world. This convention began giving out its own Dragon Awards in 2016, and several of the Dragon Award winners are Sad Puppies veterans – namely John C. Wright, Brad Torgerson, Larry Correia, and Brian Niemeier.

There is a future for non-woke pop culture. And while it takes a bit of effort on the part of right-wingers to find likeminded creatives and support their work, Sad Puppies proved that it can be done. And it also showed that progressives who prefer to write for a progressive echo chamber, and pout when they don’t get their way, aren’t the most relevant people in the long run, even if they’re still in control of the Hugo Awards.

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.

I wish I could apologize more sincerely. This is the second year in a row that I had to bump my annual predictions post from the first week of January to the second – last time it was because I stopped to write about the life and death of Jimmy Carter, this time it was because I had promised Tom Kratman, who had just sent me a free copy of his newest novel, that I would post a review of the book three or four days before the release day. And I’m glad that it happened that way, people like Kratman are doing me a bigger service than I’m doing them, by helping my Substack get more exposure.

To return to business: In about a week, Donald Trump will be a full year into his second presidential term. Last January I made several predictions for the coming year, many of them dealing with Trump’s new administration, which came into office with much bolder plans than the first one.

Then, in April, I wrote a post called “We Can’t Restore America By Obsessing Over Foreigners,” about how Trump’s chaotic, tariff-first approach to reviving the American economy was doomed to fail. My argument is that blaming foreign rivals for America’s problems overlooks the bad domestic policies that, over the last half-century, have made American manufacturing uncompetitive and American housing needlessly expensive. As it turned out, the tariffs were a disaster, with US unemployment rising from 4.0 percent when Trump took office to 4.6 percent in November, while key commodities became more expensive by 14 percent during 2025.

My own private method of measuring inflation is to take the geometric mean of the prices of gold, silver, copper, nickel, lead, Brent oil, corn, soybeans, coffee, rubber, cotton, and lumber, and compare it year over year. If all the prices double, the geometric mean doubles. If one doubles and the others stay the same, the geomean increases by a factor of 1.0595. The neat thing about geometric means is that you don’t have to decide how much of each commodity to include; whether you are looking at an ounce of gold or a ton of gold, a bushel or beans or just one bean, doubling one commodity’s price will always raise the geomean by a factor of 1.0595. So without further ado, here is my inflation table, which shows prices growing by 14.0 percent over the last year, leaving the dollar with only 27 percent of the purchasing power it had at the turn of the century.

But now I need to address the lengthier set of predictions I had made right before Trump took office, which concluded as follows:

In summary, my predictions for the following year are that Donald Trump will do better at enacting conservative policies than he did in 2017, but that he still won’t be able to pull off mass deportations, and DOGE will be a flop. Vance as VP, Rubio at State, Gabbard as DNI, Zeldin at EPA, Burgum at Interior, and Isaacman at NASA will perform decently. Hegseth at Defense, Kennedy at HHS, and McMahon at Education will flounder, to the point that no more than one of them will be in office at the year’s end.

As usual, nothing will be done about the out-of-control entitlement spending that is going to cause a fiscal meltdown sometime soon – if not by 2030 then definitely by 2040, though the process is too slow to put a dent in the dollar’s unique status this year.

Finally, in foreign affairs, I expect Turkey to consolidate power in the Middle East, Israel’s economy to stagnate, and Ukraine to either surrender, or experience worse territorial losses to Russia in 2025 than it did in 2023 and 2024 combined. The United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, and India will all avoid going to war with each other, and they will also avoid regime change. There is a chance of China trying to seize Taiwan – more likely by blockade than outright invasion – but it’s still more likely that Xi Jinping will wait until 2030 or later to make a move.

One of these predictions was simply wrong – Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were all confirmed and are all still in office. It turns out that I hadn’t foreseen just how pliant the new GOP would be in accepting people who, a few years ago, would have been clearly unfit for leadership – especially RFK Jr., who spent almost his entire career as an environmental lawyer who was in favor of legal abortion up to the moment of birth, but who is now on “our side” because he really hates vaccines.

But I was right when I said DOGE would flop – it not only failed to achieve its goals, but both Musk and Ramaswamy got fed up and walked away from it within a few months… Ramaswamy before Trump was even sworn in! Sometimes I am more than right. It turns out that government workers really don’t like having their jobs abolished, and in the two areas where DOGE was able to work without much in the way of legal barriers – that is, foreign aid and scientific research – it ended up just doing a lot of senseless damage in return for trivial budget cuts. The real problems with “government efficiency” are the complexity of the laws, the slowness of the court system, and the fact that Social Security and Medicare are insolvent – and the MAGA movement, with its love of simple stories, can’t really acknowledge any of that.

Rubio performed well at State, while Vance has been somewhat of a disappointment as VP – it’s frustrating to see someone as intelligent as him bow to mob pressure by (for instance) blaming practically every economic problem our country has on immigrants, when practically all serious right-wingers (including Vance himself) used to know that most of the problems are internally caused, and are not going away unless we deal with the welfare state and massively downsize government burdens on productive industry. I still don’t know what Isaacman will do at NASA; after he was caught in the crossfire of the Trump/Musk falling out, Trump withdrew his nomination in April, and he wasn’t renominated and confirmed until tensions had cooled in December.

Deportations were also a surprise to me – as I predicted, Trump fell short of his actual goals, but the chaotic way in which his administration has arrested foreigners has frightened more than a million people into self-deporting, leading to what’s probably the lowest net migration rate in a long time. Unfortunately not all of the people Trump has been harassing were here illegally or were even poor/unproductive, so don’t be surprised if our country’s being less welcoming to skilled immigrants, tourists, and foreign students makes us a poorer and less prestigious country over the coming years.

In foreign affairs, I was right on all but one point. There were no wars between the Great Powers or regime changes within them. After Trump failed in his ambitions to negotiate a swift end to the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia went on to have its best year for territorial gains since the war began. And Turkey continued to gain regional dominance in the Middle East – not only has the new regime which Turkey helped set up in Syria 13 months ago consolidated power (at the expense of Iran, which backed Bashar al-Assad), but Turkey is now sponsoring its own network of jihadist militias across the region, and is being included as a major partner in negotiating Donald Trump’s “plan” for the future of Gaza. (Obviously this plan, like all the others in the last 77 years, won’t be implemented; it’s the ceremonial aspect that matters – specifically America’s desire to kiss up to Turkey.) I was, however, wrong about Israel’s economy stagnating; by the numbers it actually recovered from the chaos of 2023-24, missile exchanges with Iran notwithstanding.

So on the whole I have a tendency to be right about three quarters of the time. With that in mind, here are my predictions for the upcoming year.

I expect the Democratic Party to gain control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 elections, while the Republicans hold the Senate. The latter prediction is more optimistic than that of a lot of right-wingers I know, who are simply looking at all the hate (much of it deserved) that Trump is getting from centrists, and calling a total Democratic takeover of Congress. But I think these people are failing to take into account how rigidly polarized people are these days, and thus how much harder it is for anybody to swing a state against its usual right/left lean.

The Republicans are defending 22 Senate seats right now, but except for Susan Collins’ seat in Maine, all of them are in states that Donald Trump won all three times he ran for President. The only other seat that I think the Democrats have a chance of picking up is the one in North Carolina; the other states are just too red to swing, but since the GOP has 53 seats right now, there aren’t enough swingable seats to flip the chamber.

I also expect US GDP growth in 2026 to fall below the 2025 mark, but without the country officially entering a recession. (The GDP metric is just too easily gimmicked, as Tree of Woe explains here, even before you get into the matter of Trump personally putting his thumb on the scale.)

I expect Trump’s abduction of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to have mixed results. On the one hand, I don’t think Maduro’s opponents will succeed in re-establishing a multi-party democracy – there are too many Venezuelans, especially in the military, who just aren’t going to let American sympathizers take over, certainly not after Trump’s boat bombings over the past year have made it clear just how little the US regime values Venezuelan lives. (Similar factors were at work in the American defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan – when American airstrike planners make it clear that killing fifty or a hundred civilians is better than endangering even one of their own guys, then people who at first disliked the insurgency’s ideology will support the insurgency anyway. Blood and soil is a big deal.)

But Venezuela is in a somewhat weaker position than Vietnam or Afghanistan, and I don’t expect much effective resistance to any further military operations that Trump performs there, or any economic coercion regarding oil, trading with Russia or China, and so forth. Allowing Maduro to be kidnapped the way he was, without a single American serviceman killed or captured, shows a stunning lack of competence by the military and police, and at this point there just isn’t much for the Venezuelan people to rally around in a big struggle. You can’t promise a glorious socialist future when the people have been living in a socialist present for 23 years and know what it’s like. And since they aren’t Muslims, you can’t promise them Paradise like the Taliban did, either.

Hence my belief that the situation will go to neither the best nor the worst extreme, and that we’ll simply get a regime that’s more malleable to American pressure, but is still a kleptocratic police state that can’t reverse the country’s economic collapse.

As for Greenland – despite the loud claims (including by a few people within the Trump administration) that Trump’s willingness to use force in Venezuela means that seizing Greenland might be next, I expect that nothing will happen. (Nor will there be any progress toward a negotiated transfer – see this comment for my thoughts on why purchasing Greenland from Denmark would benefit no one.)

The thing about Donald Trump is that he is a pretty malleable guy. He makes a lot of pie-in-the-sky boasts and threats, but the ones he follows through on are the ones that a lot of people around him are pushing him to follow through on. I explained this back in 2022, when I contrasted his judicial nominations (the best of any Republican president in a century) with his failure to build the border wall. On the first issue, he had Mitch McConnell, Leonard Leo, and the entire Federalist Society making it easy for him, so he followed through; on the second, he had both houses of Congress making it hard, so he dropped it and acted like it was never a big deal.

A lot of factions within the Trump Administration wanted him to move on Venezuela – this included the liberal internationalists (who want Maduro’s regime replaced with a more liberal one), the realists (who want to deprive Russia and China of a means of projecting power in the New World) and the crude nationalists who just think that foreigners (including Venezuelans) are the main party responsible for America’s drug problem and that seizing Venezuela’s oil might be fair payback.

A lot fewer people want Trump to seize Greenland by force. The liberal internationalists for obvious reasons, and the realists because they know that putting other NATO countries in a situation where they’re kinda sorta obligated to go to war with the US is a really bad idea, even for someone who’s otherwise a NATO skeptic. It takes a deluded level of nationalistic chauvinism to be in favor – and there aren’t enough delusional people in the Trump Administration to make it happen.

As for events further away from home – first, my Russia/Ukraine prediction is the same as before; either the two countries will negotiate a peace on terms favorable to Russia, or else the war will continue with Ukraine suffering more territorial losses. There just isn’t enough Ukrainian manpower left to sustain the sort of effective fighting that we saw in 2022-23, and Ukraine’s “allies,” despite their high-strung rhetoric, just aren’t willing to get involved enough to matter.

As usual I am predicting no wars between the Great Powers – by which I now mean only the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and India. I also expect no regime changes in those countries. Israel and Iran are in unstable conditions and anything could happen to them. Turkey will continue to expand its regional power as it steps into the vacuum created by declining Iranian and American power, and I think that, over the next decade or so, the regional hegemon role that Iran wanted so badly to fill will go to Turkey instead. Turkey just has too many advantages over Iran – Turks are Sunni Muslims, the faith of the regional majority, Turkey gets along better with the United States, and its leadership is more popular with its own people. (Like everyone in the Middle East, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is corrupt and not really democratic by Western standards, but unlike the Ayatollah he’s good at using democratic energy when it’s useful, and he doesn’t tarnish himself with the pointlessly thuggish fundamentalism that the Islamic Republic is famous for.)

In Asia, China could try to make a move on Taiwan but probably won’t; Xi Jinping expects to be in power well into the 2030s and he knows that his position will be stronger then. I expect Japan to continue the steps toward strategic autonomy that Sanae Takaichi has been taking since she came to power last October. Indeed the likely remilitarization of Japan is the one political development in the last year that I am unreservedly happy about.

So, to sum up my predictions for 2026: The Democrats will retake the House of Representatives but the Republicans will hold the Senate, and US economic growth will slow compared to 2025 but it won’t officially enter a recession. Venezuela won’t democratize but it won’t put up meaningful resistance to future Trumpist coercion, either, and nothing will become of Donald Trump’s Greenland ambitions. The war in Ukraine will continue to go in Russia’s favor, there will be no wars between or regime changes within the Great Powers, Turkey will continue its new role as the strongest Middle Eastern country, and Japan will continue to rearm.

None of this is especially surprising in light of what I’ve been saying in this space since I started Twilight Patriot. President Trump has done essentially what I said he was going to do – he purged race preferences from the executive branch, did well on judicial nominations, continued the chaotic but necessary retreat from strategic commitments outside the Americas, and enforced immigration laws more toughly than any recent president, but not quite toughly enough to reverse the net migration rate. But in other ways he is corrupt, egotistical, and a total chaos agent when it comes to tariffs and military action closer to America’s borders.

Nobody in American politics has any real solutions to (1) the entitlement programs becoming insolvent or (2) the growing burden of regulation and lawsuits that has crippled America’s infrastructure and physical industries like mining, and made housing so expensive that rent usually costs about twice as much (compared to the median household income) as it did 75 years ago. Therefore, I expect the US to become economically marginalized over the next decade or so, as high-tech industries concentrate in a band of Asian metropoles from Hokkaido to Gujarat, whose growth is driven by their mastery of electrical technologies like photovoltaics and battery-powered vehicles and drones.

If there is any big conclusion to take away from all this, it is this: Historical cycles are bigger than individuals. You cannot vote your way out of decline and fall. There is a reason that that old maxim – “Put not your trust in princes” – has lasted almost three thousand years. But what you can do, and what you should do, is to live among the people you’ll want to be with when political authority goes haywire, and develop the qualities of mind and soul that will keep you and your family safe from the worst parts of what is to come.

Over the last few years, I’ve reviewed a handful of right-leaning novels at Twilight Patriot. Some of these, like the books in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, were written a long time ago. But others, like Richard Nichols’ spy novel Lost Causes, are recent works whose authors ran across my substack and were kind enough to send me free copies to review. Thanks to Alexander Macris, a tabletop game designer who writes the Substack Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, I am now reviewing another book of the latter sort. A few months ago Macris introduced me to Tom Kratman, who then sent me an early review copy of his upcoming time travel story For the Eternal Glory of Rome, which is scheduled for release on 6 January (4 days from now) and is currently available for preorder at Baen Books.

Kratman is a fascinating character who already has decades of novel-writing experience behind him. But in the beginning, he was a soldier, as explained on his website:

Tom Kratman is a political refugee and defector from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. The mechanism of his defection was enlisting into the Army in 1974 at age 17, which deeply distressed his high school (Boston Latin, founded 1635) as they thought he had “higher and better things” ahead of him...

Kratman’s lengthy Army career included deployments to Panama and Iraq, combat as an infantry officer during the First Gulf War, a transfer to the Reserves so he could attend law school, a few years practicing law, and a stint on the faculty of the Army War College. He retired at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 2006, and to his great pleasure, his second career as a writer for Baen Books took off quickly enough that he didn’t have to practice law again.

Since then, Kratman has written or co-written twenty novels for Baen Books, a publishing house founded in 1983 by Jim Baen who, like Kratman, was an ex-soldier and a big proponent of military science fiction written by military men.

Kratman is solidly committed to writing war stories, but within that genre his works are extremely diverse. His excellent novella Big Boys Don’t Cry, which was nominated for the Hugo Award in 2015, is told from the point of view of a Ratha, one of the sentient tank-like war machines that fight mankind’s battles across hundreds of planets in the 30^th century. His most ambitious work is the eight-book series that begins with A Desert Called Peace, which is set in the 25^th century on a colony planet called Terra Nova, and deals with a man whose vendetta against the slayers of his family drives him to become the most brilliant and ruthless mercenary commander in a war that parallels recent events in the Middle East.

A different kind of future shows up in Caliphate, a 2008 novel set in the early 22^nd century, where the United States has transformed into an autocratic empire that rules all of North and South America, plus England and the Philippines. (And it managed to do this without repealing the old constitution, since technically it’s not illegal for the president to just pardon the assassins of his political enemies.)

Yet for many people who live in the rest of the world, America is still a beacon of hope, and a country worth risking everything to flee to, because the situation at home is so much worse. We learn this at the very beginning of the book when we meet Petra, a German girl who lives the humiliating life of a Christian dhimmi under an Islamic caliphate. When her family can’t pay the jizya tax, Petra and her brother are both sold into slavery, and at age twelve – which is a legal age for such things – Petra is put to work in a brothel. (Since this is a work of military science fiction, it goes without saying that the two civilizations will collide in a way that involves lots of bodies hitting the ground.)

Caliphate, whose cover blurb features the phrase “demography is destiny,” seems to have gotten the most attention out of all of Kratman’s books because it annoyed all the right people. Of course the charge that he paints Muslims with a broad brush isn’t true – there are several sympathetic Muslim characters in the story, who are horrified by the uglier aspects of the system they live under. But one of the things about long wars is that they tend to leave a society’s worst people in charge, as we saw in Russia after World War I, or a few years ago in Afghanistan. Most Afghans have little or no enthusiasm for what the Taliban does, just like most Russians weren’t Bolsheviks, but when a society is sufficiently war-weary, the people who are best at organizing and justifying violence will end up on top.

One of the draws of Tom Kratman’s work is that, beyond the mere technical mastery with which he approaches logistics, battlefield tactics, weapon technologies, and the other sides of military life, he’s also willing to take a hard look at the aspects of history and human nature that wokesters would prefer we all forgot about. And this is just as true in his newest project, For the Eternal Glory of Rome.

This novel begins in the year AD 9, during the reign of Octavian Augustus, just as Rome’s 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th Legions are being annihilated by thirty thousand Germans in the Battle of the Teutoburger Forest. This real-life battle put an end to Rome’s expansion into northern Europe, with later emperors, from Tiberius onward, being content to keep the frontier at the Rhine, where it stayed until the barbarians finally breached it in AD 406.

The architect of the three legions’ downfall was Arminius, a Cherusci German chieftain who had gained military experience fighting for Rome in the Balkans, then decided that he had seen enough of the Roman empire that he would do anything to stop it from expanding into his homeland. With the Roman commander, Publius Quinctilius Varus, still thinking Arminius was loyal, he lured the legions into an ambush in northern Germany, where he had persuaded several Germanic tribes to lay aside their previous quarrels and unite against the Romans. Varus’s casualties were almost total. The three legions’ eagles were captured, very few Romans survived, and Arminius himself was later described by Tacitus in the following terms:

Assuredly he was the deliverer of Germany, one too who had defied Rome, not in her early rise, as other kings and generals, but in the height of her empire’s glory, had fought, indeed, indecisive battles, yet in war remained unconquered. He completed thirty-seven years of life, twelve years of power, and he is still a theme of song among barbarous nations, though to Greek historians, who admire only their own achievements, he is unknown, and to Romans not as famous as he should be, while we extol the past and are indifferent to our own times. (Annales 2:88)

Now for Tom Kratman’s twist on the story. In this version, the doomed Legio XIIX (or XVIII, the Roman numerals weren’t quite standardized yet) attracts the pity of a passing alien spaceship, whose two occupants use their arts of teleportation to pick up all six thousand men, and much of their equipment, and drop them near the Oxus River nearly four centuries into the future. The men who are saved this way (though it takes them a while to find out where and especially when they reappeared) obviously think that the Gods have done it (or, for the legion’s Jewish medicus, that God did it), probably for some great purpose. But Kratman himself gives us a thoroughly comic account from the space traveller’ point of view, with lines like:

“I wish I could take them out while leaving their exoskeletons behind,” Red muttered. “The power drain is going to be enormous.”

“I don’t think they’d long survive that,” trilled Blossom, in sweet notes and sharp whistles, ending with a distinct click….

“Maybe they shed their exoskeletons at certain points in their lives. You know there are plenty of insects who do. I’d still bet it’s painful enough to kill them if they’re not naturally ready”…

“I am – reluctantly – taking their beasts and conveyances. The trees would be just too much. I’m also not going to try to send any of their exoskeletons that are lying around.”

“But what if they need to eat them to help them grow another? Please send those, too. And the upright plant life? They may need those to live. Please send some at least.”

“Oh, all right. Though what insect eats metal, I do not know…”

To no one’s surprise, the legionaries do end up needing their “exoskeletons.”

Some of my readers may be familiar with a few of the major works in what I might as well call the “corporate time travel” genre. These are stories in which a community of hundreds or thousands of people are plucked out of their normal lives by a mysterious force, and dropped into a different era where they have to use all their wits to survive – novels like Eric Flint’s 1632 series (a mining town from West Virginia ends up in Germany in 1632 and is soon calling the shots in the Thirty Years’ War) and S. M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time (Nantucket Island and a passing tall ship are teleported into 1250 BC). I read both those books as a child and enjoyed them, in large part for their technology/engineering side – what could people with today’s knowledge, but without today’s resources, do to get the food, weapons, etc. that they need?

But those novels’ heroes have it easy compared to Kratman’s legionaries, who are sent into their own future. At first, they have no edge on anyone else except for their attitude. They know how to work and fight as a legion, and they know what peak Roman power and competence look like. And that’s about it.

The story has two lead characters: The high-born Gaius Pompeius Proculus, the legion’s 22-year-old junior tribune, and Marcus Caelius, the 53-year-old primus pilus or first spear centurion – the leader of 59 other centurions, and in modern terms the senior NCO of Legio XIIX. I discovered after reading the book that Kratman had chosen these men as his protagonists because they are among the few real-life members of the legion whose names are known; archaeologists have found monuments erected to each of them after news arrived of their deaths in Germany.

In Eternal Glory of Rome, Gaius Pompeius is the only surviving tribune and, notwithstanding his youth, the new commander of Legio XIIX. Despite his understandable moments of self-doubt, he proves to be an able leader largely due to the advice of the gruff, solid, and experienced Marcus Caelius, who becomes like a father to him in the following years, as the Eighteenth Legion finds its bearings and fights its way back from the Asian steppe to Roman Gaul.

At first the book can seem rather slow. This, I think, is deliberate – Kratman wants to show us just how the legionaries build their camps (everything from a one-night marching camp to a heavily-fortified overwinter camp), how they build everything from outhouses to wagons to bridges, how they treat the wounded (whether man or beast), and how they promote and demote officers, reward valor and administer punishments, scout out strange landscapes, trade or fight with natives, and look after the legion’s complement of livestock and slaves. And of course how they use their swords, shields, and other weapons in battle – there are plenty of battles. Nor does the author shy away from the darker sides of Roman life – among other things, Legio XIIX owns several wagonloads of public prostitutes; these women are state property that each well-behaved soldier is entitled to use each time his rotation comes up.

It takes a few years out on the steppe for Gaius Pompeius and Marcus Caelius to build their legion into the lethal fighting force (and engineering and political force) that we see by the end of the book. And when its ten-thousand or so men and women (the legion has been swollen quite a bit with auxiliaries) ride their captured Scythian ponies all the way back across the central European plain to the Rhine where they started, they meet a Roman Empire that desperately needs them.

The legions they run into are small – barely a thousand men each, many of them barbarian mercenaries – poorly equipped, and poorly trained, no longer able to put up a proper bridge or castrum, and reliant for supplies and orders on a government rendered impotent by infighting and graft.

“In what way,” asked Marcus Caelius, “is the Empire even Roman? Everyone who isn’t a slave is a citizen, while being a citizen means just about nothing. Like citizenship, the money is mostly worthless.” Caelius barked a bitter laugh. “Why, we may be sitting on more actual cash than the Empire can come up with. Even both halves of it – did you hear me say that? ‘Halves!’ – of it. The old religion is gone, replaced by this newfangled superstition out of Judea. And Rome, our Rome, isn’t even the capital anymore.”

The men of Legio XIIX have known to expect a disastrous future ever since Appius Calvus, the legion’s haruspex, awoke. Alone out of all the men, his spirit was temporarily separated from his body after the time-travel, and he wandered far into the future, seeing such scenes as cattle being stabled in Rome’s senate house, Rudyard Kipling poring over the volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Johannes Gutenburg at work on his printing press in Mainz. (Calvus remembers enough about the printing press to build one when the legion makes it home, providing Kratman’s heroes with their sole anachronistic invention.)

By the time I had finished this book, I ended up liking it more than I thought I would.

One of my complaints was fairly minor – Kratman’s legionaries don’t curse creatively enough. They use “Hades” in the exact same places an American soldier would say “Hell,” and they have the same collection of idioms involving the word “ass” – which for me always brought to mind a literal donkey, since that’s the only thing that that word meant to Latin-speakers. (In case you’re wondering, there are scholarly articles about how Roman profanity actually worked.) Also, the ease with which the survivors of a certain massacre came to fight loyally alongside the slaughterers of their fathers and brothers was jarring – perhaps believable in a world where what we call a “war crime” is simply how war is always fought, but perhaps not; blood feuds were a serious business back then, too.

But a more serious hangup was simply that I tend to dislike alternate history stories. I think that by portraying history as a series of accidents (“Look how differently things would have turned out if Barton Mitchell hadn’t found the Lost Order, or if the Axis had gotten the atom bomb first!”) it encourages people to overlook the very deep roots of the big events in history, events which are usually overdetermined.

For instance, it’s easy to argue that Western Civilization would be in a better condition today if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, and at whatever follow-up battles he needed to fight in order to hold onto his throne. But Napoleon already was victorious in all but ten of his eighty or so battles; his empire fell anyway because, though he didn’t quite start any wars, he responded to every provocation by escalating, often to the point of getting bogged down in unnecessary campaigns deep in enemy territory (Spain, Russia, etc.) While it’s easy to imagine a version of Napoleon who was less impulsive and more aware of his limitations, that person could never have come to power in the cutthroat political environment of the French Revolution. And so forth.

(Edmund Burke had predicted, scarcely a year into the Revolution, that the chaos would only end when “some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command... [becomes] the master of your whole republic.” Burke was almost certainly thinking of the Marquis de La Fayette. When La Fayette proved unwilling to seize power in this way, a different “popular general” filled the gap. Great men matter, but only when the broader currents of history make room for them.)

Hence my perspective on the Fall of Rome: It was inevitable, due to hundreds of years of decadence and decline. The Visigoths and Vandals and other Germanic barbarians who checked and eventually reversed Rome’s expansion are the heroes of the story – along with the Parthians, Armenians, Kushites, Irish, etc. who blunted Roman aggression along other frontiers. And the medieval Christian civilization that those Germans built on the ruins of Rome was superior to it in many ways, as I’ve written about before.

And yet, Tom Kratman managed to get me to sympathize with the returning legionaries anyway. It’s one thing to ask what little thing would have had to go differently for a losing cause to be a winning one. It’s another thing to ask what would happen if an army division’s worth of men from the peak of a civilization – bringing their skills, their virility, their discipline, and their can-do attitude – were put face to face with the kind of men who appear during a civilization’s fall, men like the emperor Honorius.

“What happens if you don’t get on your belly for this boy called an ‘emperor’?...

“I don’t know,” [Marcus Caelius] admitted. “Stilicho said it’s never happened before, not in the last century.” Caelius sneered. “These people who call themselves Romans are just circus freaks, performing dogs, parading around wearing the flayed skin of Rome. Yes, sure, we lived under a dictatorship under Augustus, but he kept the forms, he kept the law, and he made us feel like we were all citizens of a republic. This lot are just slaves.”

“Tell me, man who is my husband in all but name, could you restore this thing you call a ‘republic’? Could you and all your allies and the Eighteenth Legion together restore it?”

Regretfully, Caelius shook his head. “No, things are too far gone. There’s hardly a man alive, worthy of the name, outside of the legion who even knows what a republic is, not really….”

But are things really too far gone?

In a world without time travel, we know what the answer would be. But after the finale of Kratman’s book – in which (to my relief) the Vandals and Alans and Suebi are presented in a fairly sympathetic light, and the legionaries learn from experience to question some sides of their own culture’s morality – I am eager to see what this author has in mind for the sequels. (Kratman told me that what he is planning is “probably a trilogy. Note, however, that a Baen ‘trilogy’ is five books, except when it’s more than that.”)

For anyone who’s into adventure stories, or who is fond of getting into the details of Roman camp-building, weapons, armor, and tactics, or who simply likes to ponder the age-old question of why civilizations decline and fall, For the Eternal Glory of Rome is worth a read.

Some of my readers may be familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s last speech to the Constitutional Convention, given in September 1787. Franklin described his reasons for signing the finished constitution and said (among other things) the following:

“Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupt as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

For a long time, American patriots have had a bad habit of glossing over the Founding Fathers’ pessimistic view of the long-term fate of republics. The plain fact is that most of these men did not see mankind as perfectible. Their view of history was solidly cyclical. They admired Classical Athens and the Roman Republic with their eyes wide open to those societies’ eventual decline and fall. And they wrote a constitution for their own country in the full expectation that that constitution would one day evolve into a despotism – since nothing better could be hoped for once the people began to “need despotic government.”

This is not the prevailing view of 20^th and early 21^st-century conservatives, who generally believe that America was founded as a free country and will always be a free country, that America’s problems are unimportant compared to what America does right, and that as long as we don’t officially repeal our constitution, then its checks and balances will ensure that we never have dictators like less enlightened countries do. But this is completely alien to the worldview that produced men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.

I was reminded of all this while discussing the last year’s events in Romania with one of this newsletter’s readers. The situation in the United States is (thank goodness) less extreme than what has happened over the last year in Romania, but the latter is still worth paying attention to, because people’s reaction to it says a lot about how they define liberty and dictatorship. And since the main topic of debate in America right now is whether Donald Trump is trying to become a dictator, the question of what a dictatorship is, and whether Americans are likely to tolerate one, is worth pondering.

I had written about Romania in a post entitled Romania and the Iranization of the West. Basically, what happened was that the Romanian Constitutional Court decided to cancel the December 2024 presidential election when a populist candidate, Călin Georgescu, seemed likely to win. Then it banned Georgescu from running in the do-over election in March on the vaguely defined charge of “incitement to actions against the constitutional order,” all without his ever being convicted of any specific crime. Unlike in some countries, whose judicial authorities have an explicit power to order elections redone when they suspect fraud or foreign interference, there is nothing in the written laws or constitution of Romania that gives the Court this power. But the judges did it anyway, and the decision was accepted with hardly any violence by the common people, the parliament, the police, the military, etc. – because Romania these days operates on the same principle as the United States, i.e. the law is whatever the Supreme Court or Constitutional Court says it is.

I claimed that the peaceful abolition of democracy in Romania was yet more evidence for the hopelessness of the situation in Europe. People there will blather about liberty, but nobody is willing to shed their blood to defend it against blatant internal subversion. My reader responded with: “I don’t share your deep pessimism/contempt for ‘the Right.’ The Europeans have learned an important lesson, namely, the value of the rule of law, even when the people deciding the law make bad decisions. Given the bloody history of the continent, they’re reluctant to go outside of legal channels ... and rightly so.”

It seems that this reader and I have very different ideas about what the “rule of law” means. If the “rule of law” simply means that there is a single man, or small group of men, who say what the law is, and that everybody else complies no matter how bad the decision (to the point that obedience to the Constitutional Court is a more fundamental principle of liberal democracy than regular elections!) then the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were sterling examples of the “rule of law.” After all, they had authorities whose word was law, too.

If, on the other hand, you think that barring a man from running for office without convicting him of any specific crime is the opposite of the rule of law, and that cancelling elections is just as bad when the Constitutional Court does it as when the Führer or the Politburo does it, and that European countries’ willingness to so often let their worst people seize power like this is a major cause of Europe’s “bloody history”… then you’ll probably be a pessimist like me.

(For what it’s worth, I think that if Călin Georgescu’s voters had protested the cancelation of the election by putting millions of people into the streets, building barricades, throwing things at the police, and refusing to abandon their position unless fired upon, then the government would have folded like all the Warsaw Pact countries did in the 1989 revolutions. Hardly anyone is willing to do a Tiananmen Square Massacre for the sake of Sorosism.)

Is It Happening Here? Is It Happening Now?

Two months ago, in a post at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander wrote one of the most brainless answers I have ever seen to the question of ‘How will we know if Donald Trump has crossed the line into being a dictator?’

Alexander began by explaining that, since calling your opponent a dictator or a fascist carries the implication (at least in America) that violence against him and his ruling party is justified or even necessary, it is improper to fling those words around carelessly. Can we call our opponent a dictator if he cancels elections, steals them via blatant fraud, suppresses the speech of his political opponents, ignores the will of Congress, or violates term limits?

After a great deal of pontificating, Alexander wrote that “I used to think that my bright line was contempt of the Supreme Court – when a leader echoes Andrew Jackson’s boast that ‘[the Court] has made its decision, now let them enforce it.’” (Alexander is now reconsidering that “bright line” after watching the slippery way that some ICE officials behaved during the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, when they claimed to be following a district court order while seriously distorting its meaning. But he still seems to think that submission to the courts is the most vital question, he just wishes the line could be clearer.)

Leaving aside the question of whether the authors of the US constitution intended the Judiciary to be superior to the Executive (and contemporary evidence indicates that they did not), just consider, for a moment, the silent implication here – basically, it is OK for the president to cancel elections, arrest his opponents in Congress, run for a third term, etc… so long as the Court doesn’t tell him not to.

It is worth remembering that a lot of charismatic dictators have wielded power with the full consent of their countries’ judiciaries – Chiang Kai-shek, Evo Morales, Nicolas Maduro, and Vladimir Putin to name a few. Even Adolf Hitler never bothered to repeal the Weimar Constitution: why would he, when he could count on Germany’s highest judicial officer, Reichsgericht president Erwin Bumke, to declare from the bench that everything he was doing was constitutional? (Bumke, who wasn’t a Nazi himself but who fawned over the Nazis, had held that office since 1929, and he stayed in office until his suicide ten days before Hitler’s.)

It is easy to laugh at a man like Scott Alexander, who calls himself a “rationalist” (and who is the leader of a whole movement of online people called “rationalists”) but who also defines “fascist dictator” in a way that doesn’t include Hitler. (Cue the old adage about there being some things so absurd that only an intellectual can believe them.)

But there plenty of liberals more thoughtful than Alexander. And these people are looking at the Supreme Court ruling last year that declared the president immune from prosecution for most crimes committed while in office, and comparing it to Donald Trump’s behavior this year, when his whole administration seems eager to help him commit crimes while in office. (Which might include deporting suspected illegal aliens to foreign prisons without a hearing, or selling pardons in exchange for political donations, or maybe ordering those airstrikes that killed a bunch of Venezuelans in boats near the Venezuelan coast on the mere suspicion they were carrying drugs to the United States.)

If there was ever a time when a lot of Americans have given serious thought to Benjamin Franklin’s belief that the US constitution would only be “well administered for a course of years,” after which it would “end in despotism,” then that time is now. And a lot of these people see Trump as the villain who has finally arrived to do our democracy in.

But wait – is there something else in Ben Franklin’s speech that’s even more offensive to modern sensibilities? Well, yes. He said that our government “can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupt as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

Modern liberals (most famously George W. Bush) really don’t like the idea that some cultures are suitable for liberal democracy and some aren’t. But for the people who built this country, that went without saying.

Donald Trump isn’t an evil genius. He isn’t even particularly evil. He’s vain and buffoonish and easily flattered, and his senility has made all those traits worse than they were the first time he was in office. But he doesn’t have the organizational skills to actually build an anti-democratic movement.

But what if no skills were needed? What if Americans are simply “incapable” of representative government? What if the failure of democratic institutions like Congress to provide the leadership that America needs means that something is bound to take their place?

Remember that in classical political theory there are three powers: monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. The rule of the one, the rule of the few, and the rule of the many. If any of them diminishes, then one or both of the others must increase. For sixty years America has had near-total oligarchy – but we’re so used to it that we call it democracy. Monarchy (which in our day and age looks more like Vladimir Putin than the Tudors and Stuarts) is frightening to us.

When one man looks like he wants all the power, we have pop-cultural villains to compare him to – Sauron, Voldemort, Darth Sidious, Coriolanus Snow. When a small group of men does the same thing, we tend to overlook it. But what if we’re wrong to do so? What if the difference between Trump and what came before him isn’t that Trump is more evil, but that he’s more clownish?

A Lot Of People Are Above The Constitution

In the first half of the 20^th century, the hottest moral-political issue in the United States was Prohibition. Everyone had an opinion about it, and the matter quite frequently led to violence. Americans cared enough about whether or not their country had room in it for drinking men that they amended the constitution over it, twice. Both the enactment and the repeal of Prohibition were passed by two-thirds congressional majorities, and then approved by 36 state legislatures or conventions.

In the late 20^th and early 21^st century, the big moral-political issue was abortion. Nearly everyone had an opinion about it, some of those opinions led to violence, etc. But few people ever got to vote on it – in 1973 the Supreme Court simply declared it a constitutional right, in total disregard to the constitution’s actual text. Then in 2022 a new set of justices came to power and reversed the decision. Nobody had actually changed their mind; nobody needed to. If you’re a voter in post-1960s America, your vote only matters when you’re trying to decide an issue on which the nine guys on the Supreme Court don’t have a strong opinion.

To put it bluntly: The United States is much less democratic than it used to be. It’s less like the country that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin fought for, and more like Iran, which also has elections and political parties… but where elected officials can’t legislate on any issues on which the Ayatollah, the Assembly of Experts, and the Guardian Council have strong opinions – such as how women should dress, and how often Iran should lob missiles at Israel.

Yet here in America, the single political action that the Founders intended to be the very hardest – that is, amending the constitution – now requires only a 5-4 vote of nine men who hold office for life. (Everyone knows Roe v. Wade was only an “interpretation” of the 14^th Amendment in the same sense that “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”) But besides this, there are also the lesser problems that arise when the courts step into the power vacuum left by Congress, and update well-intentioned but vague laws in a process that has none of the reasonableness, transparency, or openness to compromise that are necessary in a prosperous society.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been put out of work by NEPA lawsuits. The United States has no high speed rail, and takes an average of 29 years to develop new mines, because our environmental laws are vague, have no presumption of innocence, and allow private activists to file lawsuits at any stage of a project’s construction, causing work to be halted until the developer can prove in court that its environmental impact statements are sufficiently detailed (and the average length of a “sufficient” statement has changed with time – from perhaps a dozen pages in the 1970s to 1703 pages in 2020.) Likewise Title IX, which began as a one-paragraph Act of Congress in 1972 prohibiting sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds, has been expanded by the courts until it requires most colleges and universities to create an entire bureaucratic office devoted to Title IX compliance, to punish alleged sexual harassments in an elaborate private court system (again with no presumption of innocence), and to cut popular boys’ sports like wrestling if they lead to an imbalance in male/female sports participation.

Now you might be saying, ‘I agree with you that this is bad, but America is still a rule-of-law country with way more personal freedoms than most other countries, and MAGAs don’t realize how precious and fragile this is.’

To which I say: a lot of the time Americans don’t have personal freedoms – at least, they don’t have personal freedoms that mean anything when they come into conflict with the rights of judges and prosecutors.

A year and a half ago I wrote an article here about Stump v. Sparkman, perhaps the most horrifying case in the history of the US Supreme Court. Basically, the Court decided that parents have a right to surgically sterilize their children if they get a judge’s permission first, and that it doesn’t matter if the judge cites no laws to support his decision, does not appoint a lawyer to argue the child’s side of the case (and possibly file an appeal), or even if he examines no evidence before making his decision (the mother in this case had claimed that her daughter needed to be sterilized since she was “somewhat retarded,” but provided no documentation of this.) The Court ruled that because judges have absolute immunity for their official acts, neither Judge Stump nor anyone else who participated (surgeons, lawyers, etc.) could be sued over what had happened, regardless of how many constitutional rights were violated. (Stump’s lawyer admitted during oral arguments that, per his reasoning, a judge who ordered that a suspected shoplifter’s hand be cut off would also be immune. He still won his case.)

Besides judges and (as of 2024) the president, there is one other class of officials who have absolute immunity for violations of constitutional rights: prosecutors. Under current jurisprudence, prosecutors can knowingly prosecute an innocent person, conceal or destroy forensic evidence that favors the defendant, and even fabricate evidence for their own side. If the truth later comes out, the convict can be freed, but the prosecutor himself won’t be liable in any way. And so, with much to gain and little to lose, prosecutorial misconduct has become appallingly common. The problem of exculpatory evidence being withheld from juries is so bad that the Innocence Project, a legal foundation which has freed 2,939 wrongfully convicted people since 1989, estimates that up to 10 percent of US convicts are likely innocent.

(And I’m not saying this from a soft-on-crime position. Woke DA’s and judges who will release a petty criminal without bail, even after ten or twenty prior arrests, and don’t stop until he kills somebody, are equally despicable – and equally unaccountable.)

Obviously, the judges and lawyers responsible for creating the doctrine of absolute immunity have arguments in favor of it – they say that judges and prosecutors would be unable to do their jobs properly if they had to worry about being sued under any circumstances, no matter how serious.

But you can tell that this argument is facetious because it doesn’t apply to police officers, whose job is just as essential, but who only have “qualified immunity” – meaning that they can be punished if a court determines that they acted in “reckless disregard” of the victim’s constitutional rights. Why should a policeman, who only has a few seconds to decide whether to use lethal force (and who might lose his own life if he decides wrongly) only get qualified immunity, while judges and prosecutors get absolute immunity? It has nothing to do with impartial justice, and everything to do with which social class is making the rules.

At the end of the day, if you’re in prison for a crime you didn’t commit, or if you suffered permanent bodily mutilation as a child in the name of eugenics (or if it happened recently, transgender rights), or if one of your relatives was murdered by a career criminal who had already been arrested over and over again but was never jailed for long enough to matter – if any of this has happened to you, then you’re not going to look at the people in Russia and say: “I am so much better off than them, because I live in a country where the president is not above the law.”

A lot of people in America are above the laws and the constitution. And the fact that our leaders sing the praises of democracy, while practicing oligarchy, and sneering at monarchy, doesn’t change that.

Needing Despotic Government

Many left-leaning Americans believe that by defeating Trump and MAGA they can restore the Republic. On the Right, it’s common to find people who think that appointing enough Federalist-Society judges and dismantling the DEI bureaucracies will set us back on the right track, and are happy with the progress President Trump has made so far.

I’m more pessimistic. Remember what I said earlier about power vacuums? When Congress and elected legislatures are weak, indecisive, hyper-partisan, and content with showmanship rather than wielding power… then someone else will step into the void and try their best to get things done.

To a large extent, congressional inaction is what got us into this mess. Why did the Warren and Burger Courts’ power-grabs in the 1960s and ‘70s (on school prayer, redistricting, contraceptives, forced bussing, abortion, disparate impact, etc.) fail to arouse an effective resistance from people who complained that their rights of self-government were slipping away? Some people say it’s simply because American respected the rule of law – implying that that the Founders wanted the justices to function as dictators-for-life, rather than as members of a coequal branch of government whose decisions might justly be resisted if they usurped executive or legislative powers.

But actually there’s a more mundane answer. There were two major factions in American politics in the ‘60s – either you were for Earl Warren and the de facto rewriting of the constitution on the lines of 20^th century social justice… or you were for George Wallace, Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, and the people who threw rocks at black children when they tried to attend white schools. There were also some small factions led by the likes of Barry Goldwater and Malcolm X (two men who had a surprisingly large amount of mutual respect for each other) but those factions never got far. For most Americans, you were either with Warren or with Wallace.

And outside the South, public opinion was against Wallace. By the late 1940s most Americans realized that segregation was a relic of barbarism that ought to be done away with sooner or later. But Congress was too fractious and lethargic to end it via legislation, so in 1954 the Supreme Court stepped into the power-vacuum and began ordering the integration of schools and other public facilities. But even though white Southerners howled about their disenfranchisement, their cause didn’t get enough sympathy in other regions to make a difference; people in the North and West (and especially educated people) sympathized more with the Birmingham bus boycotters and the March on Washington people than with the White Citizens Councils, and they had no intention of making common cause with the Klan, even if that meant turning a blind eye when the Supreme Court made radical changes to the laws and constitution that (1) had nothing to do with race or (2) went far beyond the plain meaning of equal protection (as in the disparate impact doctrine, forced bussing, etc.)

By the mid-60s, Congress did step into the fray with the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Great Society programs. But it was too little, too late. In the end these bills were a mere codification of social changes that were already being enforced by the Court at bayonet point, without any democratic debate or compromise.

What we see, in essence, is a classic case of someone filling a power vacuum. There were problems that most Americans felt needed solved, their elected representatives couldn’t solve them, someone else at least tried to solve them, and that other entity came out of the fracas with more power and respect than Congress. We see the same thing happening with Title IX, NEPA, and other simple-looking 1970s enactments that have spawned more and more complicated regulations and case law with each succeeding decade, until large parts of America’s productive economy simply cease to function. Congress could at any time rewrite, clarify, or even repeal those laws, but most elected politicians don’t really want that responsibility, so someone else in either the judiciary or the civil service wields the power instead.

Likewise, judicial and prosecutorial immunity would not be such serious problems if state legislatures were willing to impeach judges and prosecutors for serious abuses of power. (In my opinion the worst villain of the Stump v. Sparkman case is the Indiana House of Representatives, which could have impeached Harold Stump for high crimes and misdemeanors, but did not even try to do so.)

It’s also worth noting that conservatives who defend the filibuster, on the grounds that big government can be reined in by requiring 60 senators plus a House majority in order to do anything important, are delusional. In practice the inaction of Congress leads to other people doing Congress’ job, and oppressing the country with radical laws that couldn’t even win over a bare majority if they were debated forthrightly in Congress or the state houses.

In recent years the situation has evolved into an outright farce, where Congress’ frequent failures to pass a budget often cause basic government functions to lapse for weeks on end, with judges ultimately deciding where money will still get spent. And while most district judges consider it a breach of their integrity to give orders for the whole nation, the handful that lack such scruples also know that everyone in the executive branch considers it a much bigger breach of integrity to not comply with the order. So you get kafkaesque events like what happened on 7 November, when SNAP benefits in California and Wisconsin were restored after those states’ governors got a judge in Rhode Island to rule that the government had to spend $4.6 billion that Congress hadn’t appropriated, and then hurried to move the money into state accounts before the Supreme Court could find out what had happened and reverse the decision on appeal.

Can one argue that the US is still democratic because Congress still exists? Certainly. But it’s worth remembering that the Roman emperors let the Senate, consuls, and tribunes stay on as ceremonial bodies long after the Republic had ended, and most men of Senatorial rank were happy to be able to keep their old wealth and status without keeping their old responsibilities. History repeats itself.

For unhinged Trump-haters like Claire Berlinski, what Trump has been doing lately is a straightforward slide from democracy into autocracy, from good to bad. But from my point-of-view, it is at most a mere pendulum swing from one bad to a different bad. If things like Trump selling pardons, and imposing tariffs only to later rescind them in exchange for a campaign donation, and making his birthday a federal holiday, and egging on police brutality, and occasionally sending someone to a foreign prison without a hearing become commonplace, then the United States will become more like a typical Central or South American country, with a corrupt, personalist president who pays little heed to written laws. (But who does worry about coups, because one of the many things the president can’t be punished for is becoming president illegally.)

But what we’ve had in the United States over the last fifty years is also bad. Neither monarchy nor oligarchy is what the Founders intended for this country. Neither the rule of the one nor the rule of the few is capable of making America great, wealthy, or free, and it’s not a coincidence that since the convulsions of the 1970s, America has steadily lost its manufacturing base, lost its capacity to build new infrastructure, and handed over its once-thriving city centers to ghetto criminals. Nor that housing prices have gone through the roof, nor that the fertility rate has collapsed well below replacement levels.

I’m not exactly happy about the situation. Switching between a judicial-supremacy left-wing oligarchy, and a presidential-supremacy caudillo state, has never been my idea of national renewal. But remember that I predicted that Trump couldn’t give us national renewal, not in the long run. My reasons for voting for him had to do with the ways that he might modestly improve a bad situation. And to his credit, he has gotten rid of federal DEI, appointed numerous right-leaning, pro-business judges, and prodded countries like Germany and Japan into taking more responsibility for their own defense.

So I don’t regret voting for Trump. But I also think that Benjamin Franklin was right when he remarked that, when the American people became corrupt enough to need despotic government, no written constitution could prevent us from getting it. Trump can’t stop or reverse that process, but he’s not the cause of it, either.

And my advice to other patriots remains what it has always been – keep your eyes open, admit that a dark age is coming, and don’t think about politics all the time, since (1) politics isn’t going to save us and (2) none of the factions are wholly innocent or wholly guilty. Instead, look after yourself, your family, your church, your hometown, and whatever small voluntary organizations you happen to be a part of, since that’s where you can have an impact.

And remind yourself that the fate of your soul does not depend on whether you lived during the upswing or the downswing of your civilization. Or, as Tolkien put it: “[You] wish it need not have happened in [your] time. So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

By the time you’re reading this, national news media will have had at least a week to debate the motives of Tyler James Robinson, who was arrested in Utah on 12 September for the murder of Charlie Kirk. They’ll have talked about how he was an ex-Mormon, how he had a transgendered roommate, how on Christmas Day when he was ten years old his mother wrote that depressing Facebook post that said: “Almost forgot Tyler! He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.”

But the situation just gets more dreadful when you remember that for every American who’s actually committed a political murder this century, there are hundreds of others who have celebrated Kirk’s assassination on their social media (one database has already collected thirty thousand such messages). And for everyone who posted unqualified celebrations (which are not rare! My own employer has already fired three such people!) there are probably dozens or a hundred more who have posted things like “I will never condone violence, but…” where the “but” is followed by a dozen or so reasons why Charlie Kirk was a Bad Person and nobody should be getting emotional about what happened to him and his family.

I know this because I saw multiple such posts from my own left-leaning social media friends. And these post aren’t just coming from low-status attention-grabbers. One of those friends saying “I don’t condone violence, but…” was a lawyer with decades of experience in his profession, who was qualified to argue cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.

And to really understand how awful this situation is, you have to remember that Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father of two, was killed for his words. He never held public office. He never signed any legislation. He was just a man who had a podcast, a man who went around the country founding chapters of Turning Point USA at college campuses, giving conservative students (who are used to feeling frightened and outnumbered) a place to meet likeminded people, and a place to publicly and peacefully debate their opponents. Which is exactly what Charlie Kirk was doing at the moment of his death – answering questions, many of them hostile, from a crowd of students at Utah Valley University.

I am not the kind of person who says “political violence has no place in this country.” I can’t square that statement with my admiration for men like George Washington, whose service in the Revolutionary War was an act of political violence. But after this assassination, I certainly have a right to be horrified by far Left’s choice of target.

Charlie Kirk was killed for his words and opinions, not to avenge any malicious or harmful act he had committed. Also, most of the opinions he held are my opinions too. And most of my family members hold those opinions, as do most of my close friends.

I was a member of the College Republicans in Arizona, where Kirk’s family lives and where he’s likely to be buried. I had friends in that state who spent most of their free time travelling from campus to campus, setting up CR chapters and TPUSA chapters, talking about politics to impressionable young people, and doing their best to have intelligent debates with people who disagreed with them… basically, the same kinds of things that Kirk was killed for. And for which millions of leftists celebrated his death – or at least shared long Facebook posts explaining why it wasn’t as sad as their right-wing friends thought.

This is the endpoint of the ethos of “words are violence” (and its corollary, “silence is violence.”) And it is the endpoint of the ethos that thinks that it’s no big deal that America is a NATO ally of countries like Britain and Germany, which are jailing people for their tweets. (After all, in America we sometimes let armed civilians shoot people to prevent murders, rapes, robberies, and other things that criminals can be jailed for… so why not mean words?)

There really isn’t any co-existing with the people who cheered on Kirk’s murder from the sidelines. Frankly, our country wasn’t even this divided in the 1860s. John Wilkes Booth was a bad man, but he had more honor than Tyler Robinson. He killed Abraham Lincoln because he believed Lincoln’s actions were responsible for the carnage of the Civil War. But you and I are expected to share a country with people who would gloat about our deaths because we say the wrong words.

At the very least, these people will say that, while it’s wrong to kill us, if we do get killed we shouldn’t be mourned. It’s because we like Israel too much, or we want to treat illegal border-crossing like a crime, or we don’t accept trans women as real women, or we’re too callous about gun violence, or we don’t think Donald Trump is a fascist, or whatever.

Now it’s true that the leftists who are our friends and family, and who know us for things other than our politics, would mostly still be sad if we died in real life. But if they only knew our political beliefs, they’d probably just say we got what we deserved, like all of those random, unnamed orcs or stormtroopers that the heroes kill in droves in a Hollywood movie. (It really is just bread and circuses for a lot of people - on Wednesday, you get to watch someone get killed for his hateful beliefs, on Thursday, you get to watch the Packers whip the ex-Redskins, who knows what the spectacle will be on Friday?)

Also, these “hateful” beliefs are conservative beliefs. For the most part they were held by more than 90 percent of the population just a generation or two ago. Basically, the pro-assassin crowd is gloating over a man being killed for being too much like their own grandparents.

I don’t know how long it will be until this country has its next civil war. Our time since the last one – 160 years – is longer than the global average, and no nation escapes political violence for ever. It’s just a fact of life that, from time to time, people with deeply incompatible value systems will settle things on the battlefield.

And I’m not even saying they never should. I think that ending slavery was worth having a war over. As was independence from Great Britain.

But I am terrified about what kind of leadership the Left is likely to have in the next war. They certainly don’t want a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln – someone who fights like a gentleman, who is careful to avoid violence to noncombatants, and who shows mercy to the defeated enemy when the war is over. Someone who is content to let his old foes live in peace, whatever their thoughts may be, so long as they don’t try to renew the war by violence acts.

But soon, people like Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders will be gone (people who disagreed with Charlie Kirk about almost everything but who, thank God, denounced his assassination as the horror that it was). And then the Left will be led by a younger generation, people who are less like Washington and Lincoln, and more like Maximillian Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong. People who are eager for one party rule. People who think that coexisting with those who think differently is the same thing as surrendering to them. People who are convinced that, as long as the other side has a voice, their side is being oppressed. And people who think that victory means silencing that voice, if necessary with violence. Lots and lots of violence.

Right now, most people on the far Left are content to fill their Facebook and Twitter feeds with screeds to the effect of “I don’t condone violence, but…” where whatever comes after the “but” is much longer and more heartfelt than what comes before it.

But the people who cheered from the sidelines are still worth fearing. They’re cowards all right – the whole point of their weaselly tweets is that they get to feel superior to the assassin (since they themselves would never resort to violence) while also feeling superior to Charlie Kirk (who died for his Awful Opinions) while also not having to put their own lives on the line for what they believe in (like the assassin did).

But the next time there’s a war or a revolution in this country – the next time those people get a chance to torture or kill their enemies with only a small amount of risk to themselves – they’ll probably be eager to do it. Certainly they’ll play along if it gets to the point that conservatives, or religious people, or whoever else they hate are hiding in basements to avoid the death squads, and ratting them out is the less risky choice. (There’s a reason that events like the Floyd Riots are popular on the Left but not the Right – when enough people are smashing and burning things that any individual’s chance of getting caught and punished is extremely small, a lot of people show their true colors.)

And so, even though the people who cheered Charlie Kirk’s murder from the sidelines are cowards, it’s still worth being afraid of them.

People on our side of the aisle need to be prepared for things to get worse. We need to own weapons and know how to use them. We need to make sure that our children are educated by people who share our values (after all, schoolteachers make up a disturbingly large percentage of the people who were happy when Charlie Kirk died.) And we need to make sure they don’t spend much time on the internet before they’re legal adults. (Just remember the killer’s mother’s post: “He can totally avoid us now that he got all of the computer accessories he’s been wanting.”)

There are people in this country who want us dead because of our words. Sooner or later there is going to be a reckoning. We can’t put it off forever; we’ve probably already put it off for too long. If we care about our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children, then we’ll keep our armor bright and our powder dry.

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.

Four months ago I wrote a Twilight Patriot review of Ascendent: Star Spangled Squadron, a graphic novel by Alexander Macris. By day Macris is a professional tabletop game designer, but he also writes the right-wing Substack Contemplations on the Tree of Woe. In my review I praised Macris’ keen insights about why woke art is bad art, and his willingness to make better art himself rather than simply whining about it. Finally, I challenged my readers who aren’t into superhero stories like Star Spangled Squadron to consider making right-wing art or literature of their own in the genres that they do like.

Richard Nichols, who found his way to my site by way of Macris and Tree of Woe, didn’t need to wait for my challenge. Back in 2017, he had already published a solidly non-woke spy thriller novel entitled Lost Causes, and he was kind enough to send me a free copy for reviewing. I read the book this summer and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Nichols was born in Jamaica to a British father and Mexican mother, and he spent much of his business career working in Britain’s food industry. Among other things he owned the British and Irish franchise for Corona Extra Mexican beer. His connection with spy stories began very early; not only was his family in Jamaica when Ian Fleming wrote his last few novels, but his father even owned one of the boats in the marina scene in the movie of Dr. No.

By the 1990s, Nichols was back in Jamaica. “This came about because I could see the terrible direction the UK and the rest of Europe was taking,” he told me. “I explored the possibility of entering politics, but since there was no meaningful resistance to speak of I soon realized my best bet was to start over in another country.”

Nichols’ stint in Jamaica only lasted a year (“…the crime was terrible…”) and he ended up in Mexico instead, where he has lived happily for about twenty years. (If the idea of moving to Mexico to get away from crime strikes you as odd, just remember that Mexico is a big and diverse country. Yucatán, where Nichols lives, has about 35 percent of the US per capita homicide rate, and the lowest rate of any Mexican state. Also, about a quarter of the people there still speak Mayan.)

The hero of Lost Causes is a middle-aged “axe-man” working for a top-secret British intelligence agency called MI11, or, less formally, “The Mill.” His codename is John Buchan, chosen by himself in honor of the Scottish statesman and adventure novelist (and, not coincidentally, another famous J. B. with whom he shares a lot of traits). Mr. Buchan hasn’t always gone by that name – he had a past life as an ordinary army officer, fond of rugby and English pubs – but he’s reluctant to dwell on those memories, and his backstory only comes out gradually, in flashbacks.

The main yarn of Nichols’ novel begins when John Buchan’s fellow axe-man, Franchise, is brutally killed while investigating some mysterious goings-on at a high-tech compound in Mexico’s Yucatán jungle. Buchan is summoned by his superiors at The Mill and given his 67^th and final mission – to find out what is going on, and (if necessary) kill everyone who gets in the way of his putting a stop to it. Buchan doesn’t much like the fact that, succeed or fail, this mission will be his last, but the higher-ups have decided that MI11 (whose axe-men exist mainly to kill terrorists and other state enemies who aren’t notorious enough to trigger a political crisis) is a relic of a bygone age, and its authority is set to terminate only a few days after Buchan boards the airplane for Mexico.

I will confess that I felt the book was slow to get started, with little action in the first 90 pages. But this changes shortly after Buchan checks into a hotel near the Yucatec city Mérida, which the author describes as “everything that Cancun isn’t. Quiet, respectable, conservative, and authentic, it remains relatively unknown, simultaneously giving the impression of being a sleepy, provincial backwater that’s trapped in time or a sophisticated, bustling mini-metropolis, depending on the mood. In addition to this, it enjoys a reputation as one of the world’s safest cities, being as far removed from the cartel-related violence elsewhere in the country as London is from, say, Athens or Bucharest.”

But the pleasantness of Buchan’s surroundings doesn’t stop the bodies from hitting the ground once the bad guys show up. For the next two hundred pages, Richard Nichols treats us to a solid thriller packed full of shootouts, car chases, close-quarters combat, daring escapes, and injuries that would leave a normal man on his back for weeks, but that Buchan just shrugs off and then keeps on fighting… because he knows that the alternative is dying, and he isn’t the kind of man to give up.

And yet, Lost Causes is a multilayered book. Beneath the heroics there is another level to the story, a level that’s both more political, and also sadder. John Buchan, for all his derring-do, is fighting on behalf of a civilization that doesn’t respect people like him anymore. And he’s fighting for a civilization that’s dying… and he knows it. Indeed he has known it for a long time. Years before Lost Causes begins, he started his military career by fighting not for Britain, but for his true homeland, Rhodesia, a country that, thanks to the actions of British politicians, no longer exists.

Buchan’s anger doesn’t stop him from moving to the United Kingdom after the fall of Rhodesia, or serving in the British Army, but we readers do get treated, every few pages, to his bitter complains about the state of modern society. We hear exactly what this hardened soldier thinks about politicians tolerating migrant crime, or children growing up with little knowledge of their country’s heroic past and even less respect for it, or sentimental leftists demanding (and getting) mercy for IRA terrorists who killed civilians during the Troubles. And we also get an earful about the rotten state of popular culture, and the explosion of obesity, and the slovenly way that most of Buchan’s countrymen dress.

Often I found this annoying (James Bond, for instance, is not a complainer). But I had to admit there was a fair amount of realism to it. After all, seeing your country falling apart, and despairing about the future, but not really knowing what to do except to keep holding up your little piece of civilization, is a core part of the conservative experience these days. (Though I’ll admit to rolling my eyes at one passage where Buchan includes “chastity” in a long list of lost virtues, right after sleeping with a woman he’s known for all of one day.)

And so, even before he hears the bitter news that he only has one more mission before MI11 closes down, our hero is at an impasse. His tragic backstory being what it is, he never really thinks about retiring from the service, settling down somewhere pleasant, marrying and having a bunch of children. Nor is he trying to reform the surrounding culture, via political action or otherwise. Instead he remains focused on his work, despising the villains within his society even as he hunts down and kills worse villains outside of it. He’s a perfect fit for the Clark Gable line from Gone with the Wind that seems to have inspired the book’s title. Why fight now? “Maybe it's because I've always had a weakness for lost causes, once they're really lost. Or maybe, maybe I'm ashamed of myself. Who knows?”

Speaking of villains, the bad guys in this story are a mixed bag. Nichols does an excellent job of showing variations in the quality of terrorists and henchmen. Some are careless blowhards who go down without much of a fight, even when the hero is zip-tied and drunk. Others are tougher and cleverer, and they keep John Buchan within an inch of his life through the gun fights and the close quarters combat, and the wild car chases and the foot chase through the Yucatan jungle – and did I mention that the finale is fought out on an oil platform in the middle of a category-5 hurricane? In the end, Buchan’s survival depends as much on luck, and on the aid of a very special girl he runs into, as on the skills he picked up before and during his last 66 missions.

My main complaint is that not all of the villains had believable motivations. I could understand the people who were in it for money, or even those who took pleasure in doing violence, but I didn’t like having to keep asking: Why are we seeing IRA bombsmiths team up with Muslim terrorists from the Middle East to launch a very elaborate attack on the United States? Who is bankrolling all this, and why? Coherent motives, and a common ideology for the terror outfit, would have made it a better story.

Near the end of the book we read a twenty-page long monologue in which the top villain explains to the hero (whom he wrongly thinks is about to die) his complete philosophy of life and politics – a theory of how a uniquely rich and permissive society, one where “everyone is always free to take the easiest, least demanding route,” has led to most people simply becoming servile drones, predators, or moochers, leaving only a handful of real men (who are increasingly misunderstood and despised) to do the work that keeps everyone else alive.

This man’s belief system is, to a letter, the same as the hero’s. He agrees with John Buchan about who’s good and who’s evil, he’s just chosen to be on Team Evil, and he takes pleasure in what he thinks will be his team’s final triumph. I’m sure that Nichols meant this scene to be exciting and climactic, but to me it seemed weirdly out-of-place, like one of those “If you only knew the power of the Dark Side!” rants that only belong in high fantasy.

As I see it, villains in spy thrillers should be less like Milton’s Satan (“Evil be thou my good…”) and more like James Bond’s enemies in SMERSH, or the hijackers that Harrison Ford fights in Air Force One – that is, they should have a belief system different enough from the hero’s that they can actually feel like they’re the good guys.

But then again, everyone’s tastes are different – and to Richard Nichol’s credit, he does give us some real character complexity in the person of John’s love interest, Cari, and her father, of whom I won’t say more. (Some surprises are best left in place.)

On the whole, Lost Causes is an exciting thriller that I would highly recommend to any right-winger who likes that kind of literature. (You can get the hardcover on Amazon.com for $17.50.) It’s a story that knows how to entertain, but it also knows how to make you think, right down to the ending: With John Buchan having triumphed over his enemies, and even won the girl of his dreams… but with MI11 gone, and the civilization that he loved so much no longer caring about its own survival, what is he to do next? There is room here for a sequel, and Nichols has even told me he is working on one. And, having enjoyed the first book so much, I would definitely read it.

This book review was originally written for the American Thinker.

A few days ago I got into an internet argument with a conspiracy theorist whose blog readership happens have some overlap with mine. (Yes, I know, arguing with conspiracy theorists isn’t a good use of one’s time – but “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”)

The conspiracy theory that day (though of course the blog’s author would never call it that) was a claim that the decay heat from spent nuclear fuel is an important carbon-free energy resource that’s being ignored by the scientific establishment so that they can channel public money into less efficient technologies like wind and solar power instead – and also that these fuel rods will continue to be an importance energy resource for hundreds of years into the future. I left a comment saying that this was wildly off-the-mark.

First of all, if the spent fuel (which continues releasing heat by radioactive decay even after fission stops) was making enough energy to be economically useful, then it wouldn’t have been taken out of the reactor in the first place. But actually, the moment after shutdown it only gives off about 6.5 percent of peak power, which falls to 1.5 percent after an hour, and 0.4 percent after a day. By the time the spent fuel is a year old, it’s giving off about 10 kW of heat per ton, and at ten years it’s closer to 1 kW. (The non-exponential curve is due to spent fuel having a large mix of radioisotopes with different half-lives.) Since you can also get 1 kW of heat by collecting sunlight with an 8-square-foot mirror, encouraging people to dig up radioactive waste in the hopes of getting their hands on some sort of treasure is a really bad idea.

In response to which, the conspiracy theorist claimed that, since freshly-produced nuclear waste has to be kept in cooling pools and is in danger of catching fire if the water boils off, it must be a valuable energy source. He also complained about the “wiki-propaganda” that I had cited, and said that if I cited some other source, then he might pay attention. Things just went downhill from there, with him angrily spluttering about the “replication crisis” (while citing zero sources of his own that disagreed with Wikipedia’s data), and accusing me, in a very rude fashion, of not understanding the differences between steam engines and thermocouples. Now it’s true that thermocouple-based RTGs, like the ones on the Voyager spacecraft, can make electricity from smaller heat sources than a steam engine needs. But they’re a very expensive way to make tiny amounts of power (470W for Voyager at its 1977 launch, decaying to about half of that by now) and the spacecraft only use them because there are literally no other options when the Sun is 19 billion kilometers away. I tried explaining all that in my comments, but he paid no attention. Basically, there is a reason this guy makes his living by writing stuff on the internet, and not in, say, engineering or architecture.

Basically, if you’re the sort of person who thinks that modern science is deeply corrupt, but that the “solution” to its problems is to dismiss any data that contradicts your own pet theories, put zero effort into searching the scientific literature for different points-of-view, and base your opinions on random guesswork instead, while spewing insults at anyone who criticizes your reasoning… then if you get into an argument with me, you’ll probably think I’m a gullible technophile who blindly trusts mainstream opinion and never does his own thinking.

Which is odd, because there are some issues on which I’ve criticized the scientific establishment quite a bit, such as the use of ADHD medication for small children, which I think is very harmful. (My thesis is that, in order to create a temporary and, in the big picture, rather trivial improvement in children’s performance in grade school, it saddles them with growth suppression, lifelong drug dependencies, and permanent deficiencies in the same neurotransmitters, like GABA+, that the drug is increasing in the short term.)

And when the real technophiles hear me say all that, they often accuse me of not believing that the drugs work in the first place (this is false – I believe they do work, but they also cause damage that should never be acceptable in the struggle to get an 8, 10, or 12-year-old to sit still for longer). Or they accuse me of being a sadist who wants children to suffer from a treatable disease, or they might insist that, had I been alive when insulin was found to treat diabetes, I would have been against that too. And finally, when such a person knows that he has run out of arguments, he might say “Well, I trust the experts” as if that settled everything, and then go on his way, thinking that I’m just as much of a paranoid conspiracy theorist as the nuclear waste blogger.

What is a Conspiracy Theory, Anyway?

Since I titled this essay “How to Question the Science Without Becoming a Conspiracy Theorist,” I owe it to my readers to explain what I mean by “conspiracy theorist,” and by extension, “conspiracy theory.”

The plain sense of the word “conspiracy” is two or more people agreeing, in secret, to do something that the authorities or the broader public would disapprove of. And this is the meaning when somebody is charged with “conspiracy to commit murder” or “conspiracy to commit wire fraud.” In this sense, conspiracies are common – for instance, I am quite convinced that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in several criminal conspiracies, and I am very disappointed in Donald Trump’s decision not to release the full, unredacted Epstein files.

But a “conspiracy theory” in the common, negative sense refers to a set of claims that ascribe an unrealistic degree of coordination to the evil forces in the world – or at least to the people the conspiracy theorist thinks are evil – and which assumes that certain power centers are working together to carry out a sinister plan, when in real life there is no plan, just a lot of people following their own interests or biases, usually without much foresight.

Consider, for example, that durable old conspiracy theory (a theory that lies at the root of a lot of newer ones!) which claims that the French Revolution, complete with the guillotine and all its other horrors, was planned out in advance by the Freemasons and Illuminati as a plot to destroy the Catholic Church. (As is explained in detail in the bestselling 1798 book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism by the Abbé Augustin Barruel.)

As far as the facts went, Barruel’s thesis was bunk. The French Revolution wasn’t planned in advance by anybody. It began with spontaneous bread riots and a financial crisis which Louis XVI thought he could solve by convening the États Généraux. And it progressed through several stages in which the revolutionaries quarreled viciously about what kind of state they wanted to build, until the losing side (including many winners of the previous quarrel) was thrown out of power and perhaps guillotined. And the Freemasons, a mostly-aristocratic club whose members came from all political factions (and who were much more likely than the average Frenchman to be decapitated) had nothing to do with it.

But the conspiracy theory caught on anyway, since by grossly exaggerating the coordination of its villains, and by flattening out the complicated politics of the era into a simplistic tale of Good vs. Evil, it satisfied its audience’s hunger for easy answers.

This, then, is what I mean by conspiracy theory – any account of events, be it in science, politics, or otherwise, which ascribes an unrealistic degree of coordination to the Bad Guys, and which accuses them of working in secret to do Bad Things, with little or no evidence and often without a realistic motive.

When a Dissenting Opinion Isn’t a Conspiracy Theory

The claim that I mentioned at the beginning of my post – that spent nuclear fuel is a valuable energy source that’s being overlooked due to inaccurate thermal data published by nuclear physicists – is a conspiracy theory. You can blather all you want about the replication crisis (which is a big problem in the life sciences and especially pharmacology, but not in physics or materials science) but at the end of the day, the fact that there are 54 commercial nuclear power plants in the United States alone, all equipped with facilities for processing and storing spent fuel, and not a single one of these has had a fatal spent-fuel-related accident, means that the engineers who design and operate the plants have a pretty good idea of how much heat the nuclear waste is producing. So the only way you can claim that something’s being held back from the public is if you posit an unrealistically elaborate conspiracy… and a conspiracy that also works against the material interests of the people involved (since if nuclear waste is a resource rather than a burden, why would nuclear engineers hide that fact?)

On the other hand, the mainstream scientific opinions and medical practices that actually deserve criticism tend to be different in a few important ways.

First, the propaganda (i.e. the mainstream belief that you have recognized as propaganda) will involve a lot of truth mixed in with the lies, since it’s against human nature for large groups of people to unite behind pure falsehoods. (For the same reason, nasty political ideologies like Communism and Nazism always begin with a lot of fair criticisms of the status quo.)

Second, when the authorities do behave dishonestly, they mostly lie by omission – i.e. by just not talking about the downsides of what they’re doing, rather than making up data out of thin air. (Scientific fraud happens, but it’s poorly coordinated, and less common than just avoiding important topics entirely.)

Third, there will be dissent from within the scientific or medical profession itself – that is, even if the bad ideas have gained majority support, there will be a minority of unconvinced scientists who put their expertise to work criticizing the dominant theory or practice.

And fourth, the harmful consensus will serve the interests of the people who are pushing it.

The National Institutes for Health’s decision to ignore the dangers of gain-of-function research, and fund the Wuhan lab anyway during the years before Covid-19, is a good example of this. The bad idea (i.e. that gain-of-function research was safe) was mixed with a lot of accurate technical data about how bat viruses would need to mutate in order to infect human beings. The deceit was by omission, since the possibility that a virus might escape the lab was mostly ignored, not covered up with a false claim that, say, the researchers possessed a master-vaccine that could stop any virus their program might later create. There was indeed dissent from within virology (see for instance this 2014 symposium on the risks of GOF research). Meanwhile, going ahead with the research anyway clearly served the interests of the researchers, who were deeply invested in their specialty, who looked forward to their future publications, and whose careers would fall apart if gain-of-function research didn’t continue.

And so we have a clear case of a failure of institutional science, that isn’t a conspiracy. No virologists ever met in a secret meeting and consciously decided to create a pandemic. They just followed their own interests, and, one at a time, gave in to the normal human impulse to only pay attention to the good things their profession does, and not talk about the downsides.

There are plenty of other cases of non-conspiratorial institution failures. Just think about the numerous people who have lost faith in modern medicine after trying for years to treat asthma, migraines, or some other chronic disease with drugs (with only partial success, and lots of unpleasant side effects)… only to find out that their problem was caused by a food allergy that could have been fixed with some simple diet changes if their doctor had simply recommended that they try.

Now in this case, as with gain-of-function research, there is an element of truth when medical NGOs publish statements saying that dietary treatments of asthma and migraines are unreliable, and that doctors should try medication first. This is because, in a technical and statistical sense, drugs are more reliable. While some people’s conditions are caused by food allergies, some aren’t, and even for the people for whom a diet change (getting rid of eggs, perhaps, or wheat or soy) will work, it’s not the same diet change. Whereas a drug works on nearly everybody. The deceit is by omission – by not telling patients that the dietary solutions are worth trying. And yet, there are dissenters; there are hundreds of doctors who research and write about the role of diet in causing and curing disease, and who recommend that their patients try dietary changes first… even as their work gets the cold shoulder from the big medical NGOs (which are funded mostly by pharmaceutical firms.) And finally, unscrupulous doctors have an obvious interest in keeping patients in the dark about non-drug solutions to their problems, since, as the saying goes, a patient cured is a customer lost.

Thus we see that all four qualities of a genuine institution-failure – that is, propaganda that’s partly true, lying by omission, dissent within the scientific field, and a clear financial interest in keeping up the racket – are involved in the near-blackout of dietary solutions for druggable problems. So “questioning the science” here doesn’t mean spinning up an unrealistic conspiracy theory – it just means keeping your eyes open to a bog-standard case of human beings pursuing their own interests, and covering for the bad behavior of their fellow professionals.

The same process is at work in the medical controversy I’ve written the most about, namely the question of whether or not it’s harmful to diagnose children with ADHD and drug them with Ritalin, Adderall, and other stimulants. (I’ve explained my position at length here and here.) As in the other cases, I acknowledge the truth of big parts of the mainstream position – i.e. I am not so thickheaded as to deny that the medications work, in the sense of producing the desired behavior change in the child. It really is possible to get children to focus better on their schoolwork, squirm less, write neatly, and not talk out of turn by drugging them.

The deceit, once again, is mainly by omission – doctors who prescribe those medications almost never admit that research about the prevalence of ADHD is chaotic and irreplicable (studies can’t even come close to agreeing on how many children have it) and this is in part because factors like how much recess a child gets, whether his school-day includes shop class, and whether he’s a few months older or a few months younger than his average classmate, all heavily affect the diagnosis rate. Which is exactly what you would expect if you admit that ADHD isn’t a well-defined biological condition at all, but just a list of traits that all children have to some degree or another (like “Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair,” and “Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes”) along with a license to drug the child if this interferes with his schooling.

What’s also omitted, from most discussions of the issue, is neuroimaging studies that show anomalies of brain development in medicated children – including lifelong deficiencies of GABA+, a neurotransmitter that the drugs increase in the short term – that don’t show up in undrugged children, whether they’re diagnosed with ADHD or not. Granted, these studies are somewhat rare, but this isn’t because scientists have tried to replicate the results and failed, it’s because most researches just choose not to follow up on those studies, despite the obvious urgency of the matter, since findings that reflect badly on common drugs are hard to publish. (Scientific journals are often funded by “charitable” contributions from pharmaceutical firms, and editors know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.)

Then there is the matter of growth suppression – and the handful of studies that pay close attention to dosage and duration of treatment are mostly agreed that children on a heavy dose of stimulant drugs for three years or more end up shorter as adults. And then of course there is the fact that, while medicating a child for ADHD produces improved academic performances for the first two or three years, the effect disappears, or at least becomes statistically insignificant, at longer timescales.

And so what we’re seeing is a great deal of lying by omission.

On to the third test of a genuine institution failure: are there a minority of dissident doctors who criticize the consensus? Yes. Such eminent men as the psychiatrist Peter Breggin and the pediatrician Leonard Saxe have written at length about why drugging millions of children, for a condition that wasn’t considered a disease at all a few decades ago, is a huge mistake.

Finally, the fourth question: does the propaganda serve anyone’s interests? Yes, obviously. The medical industry makes billions of dollars a year this way. Also, as with gain-of-function research, a lot of people are facing professional ruin if the pro-drugging consensus were to collapse. In the course of debating this issue I’ve been told things like: “These drugs are some of the most common medications in the world, and I don’t think that a treatment that’s been studied for so long, by so many people, could be harmful.”

I happen to think this gets the casualty backwards. When a treatment has been studied so long, by so many people – people whose careers would be ruined if it was broadly recognized as harmful – then no amount of evidence will convince the governing NGOs that it’s harmful.

A Harder Question: The Covid Vaccines

A lot of people who share my negative views about gain-of-function research, ADHD medication, and the overmedication of modern Americans in general, will probably be disappointed to hear that I have never believed that Covid vaccines were harmful. To be honest, I’ve been more skeptical of their efficacy than a typical liberal, and I’ve always been against vaccine mandates, censorship, and masking, but none of the evidence I ever looked at convinced me the vaccines were actually harmful. This, along with climate change, is one of those middle-of-the-road issues for me.

When the pandemic began in early 2020, and I heard a lot of power people say things to the effect of “we must keep the schools, churches, etc. closed until we have a vaccine,” I was quite annoyed. Coronaviruses, I had learned, are the same family of virus that includes the common cold, and one thing they all have in common is their rapid mutation rate – rapid enough that, up to then, there had never been a commercially successful coronavirus vaccine. So what I was being told was that my civil liberties would be held hostage indefinitely until scientists could solve a problem that had never been solved before, and that degree of confidence in science seemed misplaced.

The next summer, I got vaccinated against covid-19. I had never worried about the vaccines being harmful; I only doubted their efficacy, and worried about what lockdown enthusiasts might do if they believed it was realistic to keep us all waiting for a 100 percent effective vaccine. (This comic, for instance, has aged rather poorly.)

And for what it’s worth, my prediction of less-than-perfect vaccine efficacy basically came true; a slight majority of Americans were vaccinated in the spring and summer of 2021, yet the United States had about 85 percent as many covid deaths over the following winter as the winter before. And while I myself have probably had covid several times, the one time I actually got diagnosed and had to stay home from work was after I’d gotten three shots. (Though I still believe the statistics about vaccinated people having lower hospitalization and death rates.)

But at no point did I believe the wild predictions of vaccine-caused illnesses and deaths that the internet has been full of since about a year before the vaccines became available. The people who made those predictions weren’t making them because they knew anything about how the vaccines worked – they just distrusted the medical industry and were going to be anti-vax no matter what happened. When the vaccines were rolled out in mid-2021, and people didn’t suffer immediate vaccine-related illnesses as bad as or worse than covid, the conspiracy theorists either (1) claimed that the excess deaths were covered up, thus positing an unrealistically complicated scheme, across every country in the world, to tamper with mortality statistics, or (2) switched to claiming that vaccines cause long-term heart problems, or infertility, or some other effect that’s bad enough to justify not getting them… but the precise timing and severity of these adverse effects is of course being continually altered to stay one step ahead of reality.

Finally, if you want to keep insisting that covid vaccines are harmful, you have to believe that the United States, Russia, China, India, and all of the other Great Powers – countries which are usually quite non-cooperative with each other – are somehow in on a common scheme to sicken their own citizens. (This is in contrast to, say, psychiatric drugs, many of which are popular in the USA and Western Europe, but rare or even illegal in much of the global East and South.)

To be honest, I don’t actually blame people much for wanting to avoid the vaccines. I believe in liberty, after all, and I’ve always been against vaccine mandates and censorship. And after the blatant lies about, say, masking – which a lot of doctors were against at the beginning of the pandemic, only to drop the matter like a hot rock when wearing masks started to function as a political shibboleth – it’s not reasonable to trust the institutions anymore.

But my own decision to get vaccinated wasn’t based on blind trust in anybody. It was based mostly on a knowledge of how mRNA vaccines work. They’re an injection of messenger-RNA that makes the body produce viral proteins without building complete viruses, so that the immune system can make antibodies that will attack the real virus if it ever comes along. Since vaccines in general are a one-time (or two or three-time) activation of immune pathways that would be activated at least as strongly by the real virus, I just don’t see nearly as much potential for harm as there is in drugs that people take every day.

It’s the routine drugs, the drugs like Ritalin and OxyContin that steadily modify the chemical balances in the patient’s body, that I worry about. But it’s hard to be angry at people who don’t have my scientific background when they simply make a snap judgment about whether they trust the medical industry, and then accept or reject every controversial treatment at once. Usually these people are just doing the best with the information they have.

(I am, however, much less forgiving of Senate Republicans for voting 52 to 1 to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, after all, is a hard-left environmental lawyer who until last year believed that abortion should be legal up to the moment of birth, and his only qualification for the HHS job is that he hates vaccines even more than the average GOP voter.)

At the end of the day, people who are going to blog about controversial topics owe it to their readers to research them thoroughly, and to not fall for wild conspiracy theories. It’s perfectly acceptable to conclude that a mainstream opinion is bad or harmful, but if you’re going to accuse intelligent people of spreading propaganda, then your accusations should be realistic. You need to be aware of what parts of the official story are true, which important details are being omitted, who among the experts agrees with you, and why the majority has a motivation to spread false ideas.

If you can’t do those four things, then your blog post or essay is just fan service for people who already agree with you. It won’t convince deep thinkers who haven’t made up their minds yet, and it might even repel people who used to find your writing attractive. Chances are that there are a lot of people who were once suspicious of the very parts of institutional science that you despise… but who ran back into the shelter of mainstream opinion when they realized that there was even more bullshit outside that shelter than inside it.

I am writing this about a week after the twelve-day war between Israel and Ukraine. Inevitably the media was full of headlines to the effect of “It’s Really the End This Time” and “What if Iran Actually Closes the Straits of Hormuz?!”

As it turns out, politicians – even Iranian politicians – have different motives than news writers, and within a day or two of America’s brief, much-anticipated, and ultimately ineffective bombing run on some Iranian uranium sites (and Iran’s purely ceremonial retaliation), Israel and Iran had reached a de facto ceasefire. President Trump of course had an emotional blowup when some people started talking frankly about just how little damage his airstrikes had done, but he wasn’t upset enough to, well, restart the war. (Also, his subsequent yelling about how Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t respecting him enough is another sign that he isn’t the reliable lapdog for Israel that some Republicans wish he was.)

If you’ve been reading Twilight Patriot for any length of time, you’ll probably have figured out by now that the main themes behind my interpretation of American politics is that (1) American civilization is in a state of decline, (2) The decline can’t be reversed by the Right winning elections, though political and legal victories can still save us from progressivism’s worst excesses, and (3) The decline will not express itself as the sort of instant apocalypse that makes for a good movie, but as a slow, ragged process that might take centuries to wind down, just like the decline and fall of the Roman, Moghul, or Qing empires.

And my opinions on the future of America’s presence in the Middle East are very much in line with these themes. Or in other words, what happened with the brief Israel-Iran war, and America’s even briefer involvement in it, did not surprise me at all.

Donald Trump was elected to office on promises to get his country out of Middle-Eastern wars. Do you remember how apoplectic Jeb! was during the 2016 debates when Trump became the first major GOP candidate to say out loud that the Iraq War was a mistake? Well, there is a reason that Trump won the White House twice, while Jeb! has all but disappeared from national politics.

One thing that we must remember about Donald Trump is that he is the only president in recent memory who has never told a sophisticated lie. I have written before about how Trump has the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old child, which he shows by making grandiose promises that he can’t follow through on, by surrounding himself with flatterers, and by getting easily distracted from his goals. What he does not do is take one political position in public while coolly and methodically working against that position in private.

Trump’s speeches, while full of self-serving bullshit, are at least directionally correct. He promised a more confrontational trade policy, and he delivered it, albeit in a very haphazard way. He promised to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court, and unlike literally every other Republican president since Hoover, he did so. He promised to make life hard for illegal aliens, and it eventually happened. He promised American withdrawal from the Middle East, and in a chaotic, klutzy, two-steps-forward, one-step-back manner, he has delivered.

To be honest, America would be headed in this direction even without Trump. Barack Obama’s 2008 wins (over Hillary Clinton in the primaries and John McCain in the general) were due in large part to his running as a peace candidate. (And if he had governed as a peace candidate, there’s a good chance that Trump might never have been his successor). Public opinion has changed a lot since 2003.

Partly, what happened was a matter of experience. If you came of age during America’s failed attempts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies by force, then you’re going to have a more cynical attitude toward wars of choice, and you’re going to keep an eye out for signs that the good guys and the bad guys aren’t that different once you scratch the surface.

(It’s easy to wail on the Star Wars prequels for having the worst dialogue in the history of cinematic dialogue, but you’ve got to remember that little boys from my generation still grew up with Anakin Skywalker as their culture hero and, well, there are certain consequences to having the central story of one’s childhood revolve around a Republic that becomes an Empire after getting lied into a useless war in which both sides are secretly led by Sith Lords. And the fact that as these children got older, a lot of them turned to even more cynical pop culture like Warhammer 40K should just drive the point home even more.)

To put it bluntly, the appetite to go off crusading for “democracy” just doesn’t exist anymore. The handful of US bases in Iraq will probably keep hosting American soldiers for another few years, or even a decade or two, since big empires prefer to retreat slowly, but retreat is still the word of the day. There will be no more nation building. There will be no regime change in Turkey or Syria or Iran.

But I take the isolationist position and say that it is, on balance, a good thing that America is making a slow, face-saving retreat from its project of trying to impose liberal democracy on cultures unsuited to it, there are still two big follow-up questions that I deserve to be asked. “What about oil?” and “What about Israel?”

I frankly do not buy the claim that America’s post-2001 adventures were motivated by a desire to steal other countries’ oil. Yes, some oil theft happened; it did not come anywhere close to paying the costs of the wars, and the people who think that simple greed is the principal factor in America’s foreign policy tend to been driven by the same simplistic, zero-sum economics that makes them get excited about socialist policies on the domestic scene. (And it’s worth remembering that the really long war, the one in Afghanistan, was fought in a country with virtually no natural resources apart from opium poppies, which the Americans destroyed every chance they got, making a lot of enemies in the process.)

And finally, there’s the matter of Israel, the final Gordian knot on which every attempt at a reasonable Middle East policy must snag. We hear that we must protect Israel because it is the only vibrant democracy in the Middle East! That we must protect Israel because it is an innocent lamb trying to defend itself in the middle of a flock of wolves. That we must protect Israel because Jew-hatred is the evillest evil that ever evilled and if Jews aren’t safe in Israel they won’t be safe anywhere. That if we don’t stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, then Iran will annihilate Israel and then all of West Asia will have endless war. And so forth.

I would be lying if I said that my feelings on Israel weren’t complicated. It’s precisely for that reason that I very rarely talk about Israel on my blog; Middle Eastern wars are complicated, I don’t consider it my duty to have an opinion about every conflict going on in the world, and I think that America would just be much better off if most of us cared a lot less about ethnic tensions on the other side of the planet. But be that as it may, Americans do care a lot about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so I might as well say what I think will happen as America continues its two-steps-forward, one-step-back march toward isolationism.

To begin with, I am not worried about nuclear war. The last 79 years of history give us a pretty clear testimony that mutually assured destruction works. Ever since World War II, even the really bad regimes have avoided direct war between nuclear powers, because even the people at the top of the really bad regimes want to stay alive and in power. If Iran develops nuclear weapons, then it will probably just settle into a cold war with Israel where it keeps arming and training its proxies – Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, etc. – but both sides carefully avoid existential wars, just like the United States and USSR did.

Part of the reason I believe this is that Iran already has MAD capabilities viz. a viz. Israel. The Ayatollah probably doesn’t have a fission bomb yet, but his country has had nuclear reactors since before the 1979 revolution, and those reactors have been quietly piling up thousands upon thousands of pounds of spent fuel. The reason that Hiroshima is a thriving city today and Pripyat is not is that spent fuel (like what was released into the atmosphere in the Chernobyl fires) is much worse for long-term contamination than a simple nuclear explosion (Little Boy, for instance, released a little less than two pounds of fission products).

So if Ali Khamenei really was an apocalyptic nutcase who wanted to destroy Israel whatever the consequences, then he would just have to fill a few of his existing ballistic missiles with finely ground nuclear waste, and set them to air-burst over downtown Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. It wouldn’t matter if the missiles were intercepted; dirty bombs don’t need to explode right over the target in order to get the job done. This weapon would not produce the immediate mass death of a real nuke, but rich Jews who had the option of living somewhere less radioactive – for instance, New York – would hurry to exercise that option, and Israel would never be the same.

And neither would Iran. Because mutually assured destruction works.

So I don’t think that Iran is Israel’s biggest problem, at least in the long run. Rather, the problem is America – specifically, Israel’s dependence on America, and the fact that the younger generation of Americans (of which I am a part) does not sympathize with Israel over Palestine – it’s more like a fifty-fifty split. Since Israel’s grand strategy for several decades has basically amounted to “Make enemies of everybody around us and rely on Uncle Sam to pick up the slack,” that’s a problem.

In my grandparents’ generation, almost everyone who cares about Israel is pro-Israel (a lot of them are the children of Holocaust survivors, and it shows). My parents’ generation are also, on balance, pro-Israel. But people my age lean more toward Palestine. Partly it is just because there are more Muslim than Jewish Americans my age; I know firsthand that the universities and the skilled professions like medicine are especially well stocked with immigrants from places like Egypt and Jordan who basically see the Palestinians as people just like them who ended up on the wrong side of a line drawn by Britain, but even beyond that millions of young progressives are just excited about globalizing the Intifada because, for a young progressive, it’s what you do.

And that matters. America is not always going to have Israel’s back forever. Just consider what would happen if the Turkish military loaded one or two hundred naval mines onto Bayraktar drones, flew them over the Mediterranean on a foggy night, and dropped them in Israel’s ports. If that happened tomorrow, the answer is obvious: the United States would do something awful to Turkey. But if it happened in twenty years, when the generation that sympathizes with Palestine is in control? Who knows. It would certainly put a big hole in Israel’s attempts at having a stable, high-tech economy.

At the end of the day, simply being the least barbaric country in a barbaric part of the world is not going to cut it. For well over half a century, there have been millions of Palestinians who want to make peace with Israel and live ordinary lives. Billions of dollars of international money have flowed into this “peacemaking” process, a process which has gotten more outside attention than its counterparts anywhere else in the world – from hundreds of United Nations resolutions, to the Oslo Accords, to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that goes touring all over the world to prove that Israeli and Palestinian musicians can get along (I’ve seen them in concert in Georgia!)… basically, a lot of people want this thing to get resolved peacefully.

And Israel’s government has done practically nothing to convince anyone from Palestine that peace is worth working for. Whether it’s the fact that Israel’s government keeps turning a blind eye to illegal settlements in the West Bank, or the fact that murders of Palestinians by Israelis are treated like ordinary crimes while murders that go the other way around can lead to hundreds of random bystanders having their houses bulldozed, or thousands of people losing their jobs due to new checkpoints popping up on the roads they used to drive to work on… to the fact that the people behind the bombing of Gaza seem to think that it takes one hundred dead Gazan women and children to balance out one dead Israeli, or the fact that one of Israel’s cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir, used to keep a portrait in his living room of the vile terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 unarmed Muslims in a mass shooting at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994… and almost no one in the Likud party thinks that disqualifies him from politics.

And the end result of all this is that a lot of young Palestinian men – men who in most countries would have been quite happy to settle down and marry and focus on education or making money, and forget all about old ethnic grudges – will instead become terrorists, because it is the only thing that gives them agency in their lives.

I know full well that it is as easy as pie for Israel enthusiasts to point out the admirable qualities of Israel – their universal military service and excellent arms industry, their brilliant intelligence operations, from the capture of Adolf Eichmann down to last year’s exploding pagers and everything in between, their superior art, music, and architecture, the great contributions that Israel has made to botany, archaeology, and many other useful sciences, or the fact that Jerusalem under Israeli rule keeps Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holy sites mostly open to their respective worshipers while Jerusalem under Jordanian rule in 1948-67 did not, or how Israel is one of the few democratic countries that was wise enough to tell the anti-nuclear-proliferation people to go pound sand (and honestly, the world would be a much safer place today if Taiwan and Ukraine had followed their example.)

And yes, whenever Israel does something bad, it is easy to say that Israel’s neighbors are worse. Do some Israelis admire Baruch Goldstein? They’re not as numerous as the Arabs who admire Osama bin Laden. Do lots of Muslim civilians get killed in the bombings of Gaza, Lebanon, etc? Well Saudi Arabia killed more people while bombing Yemen. Are Palestinians, who are in practice just as subject to the Israeli government as Israelis are, denied representation in the Knesset? Yes, but in Iran the elections are entirely fake, and in Saudi Arabia no one gets to vote at all. Have somewhere around a million Muslims been driven out of their homes in Israel’s various wars since 1948? Yes, but China put two million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang in just the last decade, and neither the UN nor most Muslim countries will even talk about it.

But at the end of the day, I think that if a country really wants America’s friendship and support, I don’t think it’s enough to just be less bad than its neighbors. You have to actually believe in American values, and be willing to sacrifice for your beliefs. This, for instance, is why even though I despise Marxism and would be glad to see the Chinese Communist Party die the death, I think that America is being too generous to countries like Japan and South Korea by continuing to shoulder most their defense burden even as they neglect their own militaries, and spend far less on defense (as a percentage of total GDP) than the United States does. Basically, America shouldn’t care more about other countries’ preservation than they care about it themselves.

Israel’s problem isn’t quite the same – Israel obviously cares very much about its defense, more so than perhaps any other country on Earth. At the same time, the Israelis, at least under Netanyahu’s Likud government, don’t seem to have the least interest in even trying to make peace with their enemies – from the victims of the West Bank pogroms, to the Iranians against whom they launched a (totally unprovoked) missile war three weeks ago, and everywhere in between.

So far, Israel’s strategy has worked – America has given Israel just enough support, whether in the form of munitions, intelligence, or arm-twisting of other Middle Eastern countries – to make sure that Israel comes out on top, no matter how many unnecessary conflicts the Israelis provoke, or how many opportunities to make peace they toss away.

But that won’t keep happening forever. Between Donald Trump’s two-steps-forward, one-step-back withdrawal from an overextended foreign policy, to the slow generational changes that are replacing Zionists with Palestinian sympathizers here in America, Israel will slowly but surely lose its top ally. And after that, life will be hard.

These are my frank thoughts on the Middle East, America’s role in it, and what is likely to happen as the American empire keeps declining. The 29 Israeli’s that were killed this month, and the nine thousand or so left homeless by Iran’s missile strikes, will eventually seem like a small number. I hope that Israel gets a clue, and changes course before it’s too late.

In the five years since I began writing the Twilight Patriot Substack, I’ve only had occasion to mention one pope – and that was the medieval Pope Innocent III, who appears briefly in my essay on the Magna Carta.

My usual indifference to the See of Rome and its affairs is because (1) Twilight Patriot is not a religious publication – while I think it’s important for American patriots to worship God and to believe in the immortality of the soul, I don’t consider myself qualified to tell them how to do so, and (2) I am annoyed by the attempts by journalists to treat popes and other Catholic prelates as political figures, and to debate where they fit in on the left-right axis.

If you’re a Catholic and you believe that these men are chosen by the Holy Spirit, then the reason for refusing to put them in political boxes should be obvious. If, like me, you’re merely an astute observer of events, then just remember how John Paul II annoyed the traditionalists by kissing the Quran as a gesture of friendship to Muslims, and how Francis annoyed the liberals by complaining about the frociaggine (i.e. “faggotry”) in the Vatican. These “factions” in the Church, and their respective popes, are not as different from each other as the news industry tries to make us think!

This was also the reason that, when Robert Cardinal Prevost from Chicago was elected last week and became Pope Leo XIV, I wasn’t at all surprised by the regnal name he chose. After all, popes and cardinals and bishops are also annoyed by the attempts by outsiders to cast everything they do in a factional light, and every new Pope naturally wants to emphasize unity and make it clear that he’s a Pope for the whole Church. But to reuse the name of any recent pontiff – for instance, by becoming Pius XIII, John Paul III, Benedict XVII, or Francis II – would align oneself with a faction.

Francis tried to get around this problem by naming himself after a saint (Francis of Assisi) whose name had yet to be used by any popes. But this was a radical enough move that if the next pope had done the same thing, he would have simply been saying, “I’m going to be a second Francis,” which is not the message Cardinal Prevost wanted to send. And so he had to reach back a little more than a century into the past, for the name of the most recent pope who is admired by just about everyone in the Church – and that was Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903.

Pope Leo XIII had a fascinating life – he was born in 1810 as the sixth child of a Sienese count, and a descendent of Cola di Rienzo, the great Roman populist of the early Renaissance. He was a clever boy, writing poetry in Latin by age 11; at 18 he entered a pontifical academy where he was soon impressing the cardinals with his knowledge of canon law. He rose steadily through the ranks and at age 67 was elected pope, reigning until his death at 93, during which time he became the oldest pope ever, as well as the first pope to be filmed, and the first to have his voice recorded.

A lot of progressive commentators are gushing over the new Pope Leo’s apparent admiration for Leo XIII, whom they describe as a “social justice” pope, who by issuing the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, “defended workers’ rights” and “laid the foundation for Catholic social teaching.”

The expectation seems to be that the people who read these headlines will nod along with the progressive buzzwords without thinking too hard about what these things meant in 1891, much less actually reading Rerum Novarum for themselves.

I am of the opinion that everyone should read Rerum Novarum. (Here is the Latin original; here is the official English translation.) “But I am not Catholic,” some of you might say, “so why should I care what a long-dead pope had to say about the proper relationship between labor and capital?”

Well, I am not an Anglican, but I still managed to write a very positive review of C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy last November. There is just something important about seeing a Christian thinker, of whatever denomination, predict what will happen if mankind keeps on pursuing some materialist vision of utopia – and then seeing that prediction fulfilled. And for Leo XIII, writing way back in 1891, that utopian vision was the one peddled by the Socialistae – the followers of people like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (no one had yet heard of Lenin or Trotsky) who insisted that a happy and just society was about to come into being, if and only if socialist revolutionaries could abolish private property.

Leo was not an apologist for laissez-faire capitalism. He was frank about the hard condition of the working poor in most of Europe, and the genuine evils that had stirred up class conflict and made the doctrine of the Socialistae seem appealing. He writes that:

Some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

Pope Leo XIII was unapologetically in favor of what were, at the time, called “social laws” – laws which regulated workplace safety conditions, established minimum wages, limited the hours and days of labor to ensure workers had enough time for rest and worship, forbade women and children from being employed in work “unsuited to their sex and age,” and ensured that children had enough education that they could make the best use of their talents, even if they began life poor.

But with the would-be abolishers of private property, there could be no compromise. It was against human nature. Man, at his creation, had been given dominion over the earth, and had been commanded to till the soil to earn his bread. To forbid him from owning the soil he worked, the tools with which he worked it, or the fruits of his toil, would be to deprive him of his humanity.

To the Marxist intellectuals, who gabbled about the difference between “private property” and “personal property” – who insisted that only the “means of production” would be owned by the state, and that workers would still receive wages for the labor they contributed – Leo’s response was simple. Men of thrift and foresight, as soon as they had saved up a little money beyond their immediate needs, would want to buy land with it, or machinery, or something that would make supporting their families a little easier in the future than it had been in the past. And if a working man couldn’t reinvest his own wages, then they were never his wages to begin with.

Would social inequality be the result? Of course. And Pope Leo (who is after all the son of a count!) isn’t much troubled by this.

It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialistae may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition.

Due to mankind’s fallen condition, inequality will not only produce benefits to the human race, but also suffering and hardships that have to be endured. But this doesn’t mean it can be done away with, and those who “pretend differently – who hold out to a hard-pressed people the boon of freedom from pain and trouble, an undisturbed repose, and constant enjoyment – they delude the people and impose upon them, and their lying promises will only one day bring forth evils worse than the present.” Also:

Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvellous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.

Later in the encyclical, Leo talks about the especial duties which governments have to protect the working poor, and the right which the workers have to form trade unions and workingmen’s associations to collectively bargain for their rights, and to provide relief for widows, orphans, and the sick or injured. He also argues that these organizations will succeed to the extent that they are motivated by Christian charity, and a realization that working for the material well-being of one’s fellow men is not an end in itself, but a preparation for the world to come.

But what does he hope will be achieved, in this world, by all this work on behalf of the poor?

If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income... The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.

Many excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided. For, the result of civil change and revolution has been to divide cities into two classes separated by a wide chasm, [but] if working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective classes will be brought nearer to one another. A further consequence will result in the great abundance of the fruits of the earth. Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them; nay, they learn to love the very soil that yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of good things for themselves and those that are dear to them... And a third advantage would spring from this: men would cling to the country in which they were born, for no one would exchange his country for a foreign land if his own afforded him the means of living a decent and happy life. These three important benefits, however, can be reckoned on only provided that a man's means be not drained and exhausted by excessive taxation. The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has the right to control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to absorb it altogether. The State would therefore be unjust and cruel if under the name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of more than is fair.

This, then, is the “social teaching” to which Pope Leo XIII committed the Catholic Church: That without property there is no liberty, and that church and state should work together to create a nation of property-owners – a nation that makes no pretense to bring about earthly equality, but does its best to make sure every working man is rewarded for his toil, and that those with the greatest talents, and best work ethic, are able to rise to the stations where they can be of the most use to their fellow men.

On the whole, the moral sense of Rerum Novarum is closer to what one finds in the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute than it is to the platform of practically any present-day left-wing party.

And it’s worth remembering that Pope Leo’s predictions were borne out by events. Just as Pope Paul VI, when he issued Humanae Vitae in 1968, had foreseen the bad results of the sexual revolution with far more clarity than its naïve promoters did, so too did Leo XIII, nearly eighty years earlier, foresee the bad results of the Bolshevik revolution.

The nations of Catholic Europe where Leo’s teachings were held in the highest regard – that is, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, and pre-WWII Poland – all managed to put a lid on the class conflict and avoid the horrors of communism (though in Spain this was a near-run thing). Protestant countries like England and the United States, who were led in a similar direction from their own pulpits, also prospered. Meanwhile it was Russia, where the Orthodox Church was subservient to the Tsars and largely failed to call out corruption and greed among the upper classes, that fell to the horrors of Communism.

Rerum Novarum means “of the New Things,” in Latin, though it is often translated loosely as “Revolutionary Changes.” And though the matters that Leo spoke of may not be as “new” as they were in 1891, they are still very relevant. And we patriots would do well to remember that if we want men and women to “cling to the country in which they were born,” then we must make sure that government does not simply try to help corporations maximize profits. It must also defend the domestic labor market, keep skilled industries in the country rather than offshoring them, and force people to respect borders.

In short, we must favor the “national conservatism” of statesmen like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance over the worn out globalism of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and Klaus Schwab.

This, then, is the “social teaching” that the author of Rerum Novarum left behind him. And if you are as curious about the world as I am, then you will read Rerum Novarum for yourself, instead of blindly assuming that the left-wing press knows what it’s talking about when it says that Leo XIII was a “pope for the poor” or a “champion of the working classes!”

This essay was originally written for the American Thinker.

If I could recommend one book to a new student of history, who wants to see late colonial America through the eyes of those who lived in it, what would that book be? If I were to add one book to the curriculum for high school freshmen – a book to be read and pondered by youths just setting out on the period of life when one’s work ethic, and the kind of company one keeps, will determine one’s future happiness – what volume would I choose?

What if I had to pick one book that best illustrates how an industrious small businessman can rise to greatness in a small but growing American town? Or one book to help patriotic Americans understand the political attitudes of their nation’s founders during the Republic’s long gestation, when the quarrel with Britain had yet to burst into the open?

I would answer all these questions with the same book: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

It is hardly a perfect book, not least because it was written in fits and starts – begun in 1771 (when Franklin was already 65 years old), set aside during the Revolutionary War, and picked up again in France a year before his return to Philadelphia in 1785. Between the author’s poor health, his being President of Pennsylvania, and his work at the Constitutional Convention, he hardly had more time to work on it before dusk finally fell on him at age 84. (The narrative breaks off abruptly in 1758 – a full seven years before the Stamp Act that had set off all those later events.)

The Autobiography should not be read alone. Not only does it leave out half the story, but there are elements told with more clarity and skill by outside voices. H. W. Brands’ The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin is a fine volume; at about 720 pages it is much longer than the 176 page Autobiography, but with such an interesting subject matter there is no risk of getting bored. Brands’ book was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize; if that doesn’t seem impressive enough, you could go with William Cabbel Bruce’s or Carl Van Doren’s biographies, which won their respective Pulitzers in 1918 and 1939.

Also, most published versions of the Autobiography will be bound together with a collection of Franklin’s “Other Writings;” though which of these other writings one gets to read depends on the preference of the editor. Some volumes go heavy on political philosophy or personal ethics, others are more interested in Franklin the scientist (whose work goes well beyond that famous scene with the lightning and the kite), while yet others prefer to focus on his most humorous and whimsical works – like the letter where he describes how, as a boy of about ten swimming naked in a Boston pond, he had discovered that he could use a kite to sail across the water with hardly any effort. Or the pamphlet written near the end of his life, when he boasted of how much candle-money he could save for the people of Paris if only they ceased doing so much business by night, and hearkened to Franklin’s discovery (unknown till then!) that not only does the sun rise around 6 o’clock each morning, but “that he gives light as soon as he rises.”

I intend to discuss the letters and pamphlets in the second half of this review. The narrative of the Autobiography – how Franklin rose from his obscure boyhood in Boston to become one of the leading citizens of Philadelphia – must come first.

The story begins in Boston, where Benjamin was born in January of 1706 to Josiah and Abiah Franklin, he being the youngest son out of the seventeen children of Josiah and his two wives. Josiah Franklin was a tallow-chandler (i.e. a candle and soap-maker) who had immigrated from England in the hopes of finding a better place to raise a large family in his strict Puritan faith.

The broad outline of Franklin’s life is likely already familiar to most of my readers. The Autobiography, seeking to honor its author’s parents, passes over many of the harder aspects of his relationship with them, though it’s impossible to hide the fact that he found Boston’s intellectual climate stultifying, with its endless disputations between stern Protestant sects, each convinced that, without rigorous doctrinal correctness, sinners had no hope of withstanding the wrath of God.

“My Father's little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at a time when I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way...”

In other ways, Franklin’s childhood was a happy one:

“Living near the Water, I was much in and about it, learnt early to swim well, and to manage Boats; and when in a Boat or Canoe with other Boys, I was commonly allowed to govern, especially in any case of Difficulty; and upon other Occasions I was generally a Leader among the Boys….”

Josiah eventually realized that his youngest son was unlikely to become a clergyman (as he at first hoped), and that the boy also disliked the tallow-chandler trade so much that he was in danger of running away to sea. Thus twelve-year-old Benjamin was apprenticed to his elder brother James, a printer. The brothers got along poorly – James often exercised his legal right to beat Benjamin, while Benjamin, for his part, eventually ran away to Boston a little before his 18^th birthday, rather than serving till 21. That Benjamin was cleverer than James did not help; it’s well known that Benjamin’s earliest published works were a string of commentaries on Boston society under the pen name “Silence Dogood” – a young woman whose erudition James admired until he found out who it was that was slipping the letters under his door at night.

From the beginning, Benjamin showed his trademark virtues of industry and thrift. He became a vegetarian, eating bread and raisins while his brother dined on meats with a neighbor, and spending the money that he saved on books. Soon he had also become enthusiastic about the health benefits and superior ethics of his diet, though this conviction lasted only until he fled Boston for Philadelphia by sea:

“Being becalmed off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and haul’d up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food, and on this Occasion, I consider’d with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, and, when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between Principle and Inclination, till I recollected that, when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon Cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”

It is impossible to keep describing Franklin’s story in even this paltry level of detail – one has simply got to read it for oneself. One will meet with a number of colorful characters: there is John Collins, the other “Bookish Lad” in Boston who was young Benjamin’s most trusted friend, and who followed him to Philadelphia only to show that, away from the strict eyes of Boston’s Puritans, he couldn’t handle the temptation of drink. There is Samuel Keamer, the eccentric Philadelphia printer who hired Franklin as a journeyman, and who became so dependent on Franklin’s intellect and industrious habits (which he himself lacked) that he could never quite be rid of him, despite his many attempts.

There is Sir William Keith, the “compleat Rascal” of a governor, whose offer to send Franklin to London with money to buy a press and type and set up for himself (coming not quite one year after the youth appeared in Philadelphia) left Franklin feeling very proud of himself – until his ship arrived and he found that the bills of credit that Keith had promised him were missing, and that he would have to earn his own way as a journeyman in London. (It was there that he was nicknamed “the Water-American” for his refusal to take up the Londoners’ habit of drinking beer at all hours of the day.)

Then there is James Ralph (“I think I never knew a prettier Talker”), a young rapscallion from his literary society (Franklin was founding new clubs and societies wherever he went). Ralph accompanied Franklin to London under the pretense of buying merchandise; in reality he was deserting his wife and infant daughter. Having convinced himself that he would soon become a famous poet, Ralph borrowed money liberally from Franklin and annoyed him with requests for commentary on a long epic poem that he was writing.

Their relationship ended abruptly, when Franklin yielded to the temptation of romancing a woman Ralph was involved with, after which Ralph made off with Franklin’s money. For decades, Franklin heard nothing more of the man, though in the end he was surprised to hear that Ralph had actually made it as a writer, authoring major works of English political history with titles like “The Use and Abuse of Parliaments.” (His poetry remained bad.)

Franklin, for his part, later called the woman business one of the “errata of my life.” Though his frequent philanderings are no secret, he made plain in his writings that he considered chastity to be an important virtue, and that his affairs were an embarrassment that no one ought to imitate.

Three years later, Franklin was back at Samuel Keamer’s printinghouse in Philadelphia, where not long afterward Deborah Reed, the fiancée with whom he’d abruptly broken off his engagement when he found himself stranded in London, had become his wife – though the marriage had its own collection of difficulties.

The narrative follows Benjamin Franklin as he opens his own print shop, begins publishing a newspaper called the Pennsylvania Gazette, sires three children, and creates his most famous character – Poor Richard, the wit-dispensing almanack-maker who, since John Paul Jones’ day, has had three US Navy ships named after him. Franklin’s industrious habits, and his conduct in public life, his drive to make himself useful to his adopted city, and to be persuasive while offending as few people as possible – all of these are worthy of study by anyone who aspires to be a successful entrepreneur or a notable citizen of his or her town.

One memorable incident is, I think, especially worth quoting, as it shows the attitude that propelled the young printer so far in life. After being commissioned to print a history of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, Franklin and his partner Hugh Meredith

“Work’d exceeding hard, for the Price was low. It was a Folio, Pro Patria Size, in Pica with Long Primer Notes. I compos’d of it a Sheet a Day, and Meredith worked it off at Press. It was often 11 at Night, and sometimes later, before I had finished my Distribution for the next day’s Work: for the little Jobbs sent in by our other Friends now and then put us back. But so determin’d I was to continue doing a Sheet a Day of the Folio, that one Night when having impos’d my Forms, I thought my Day’s Work over, one of them by accident was broken and two Pages reduced to Pie, I immediately distributed and compos’d it over again before I went to bed. And this Industry visible to our Neighbors, began to give us Character and Credit…”

As both a printer and the holder of several public offices – most notably postmaster general – Franklin had a fascinating place at the center of early America’s intellectual, religious, and political life. For instance, we can read his thoughts on the controversy of Reverend Samuel Hemphill, whose sermons had too much morality (and thus too little Presbyterian doctrine) to avoid causing a scandal in the Presbyterian church, though his brief tenure was the only time that Franklin was a regular churchgoer.

We readers are also told about the crowds that flocked to hear George Whitefield preach his revival sermons, the sometimes comical ways that Quakers wriggled out of their sect’s commitment to pacifism, and the political impasses caused by Pennsylvania’s Proprietors – the children of William Penn who had inherited the right to appoint the colony’s governor – caring for nothing except to keep their personal estates exempt from taxes, even when all of British America was in a commotion during the French and Indian War (a conflict in which Franklin himself took no small part).

And then there are the clubs and societies that Franklin kept founding – the Junto, the Union Fire Company, the Association for General Defense, the Pennsylvania Academy, and finally (in his wealthy and influential middle age) the American Philosophical Society. And there are Franklin’s experiments with electricity, and his quest to enumerate a set of thirteen virtues and live by them exactly, making black marks in a little daily journal whenever he failed on one point or another. (“I was surpriz’d to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined….”)

Trying to summarize this book any more would be fruitless. It is not without reason that it has garnered such praises as: “Franklin’s is one of the greatest autobiographies in literature, and towers over other autobiographies as Franklin towered over other men,” or “[it is] the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men.”

If you are at all interested in American history, you should read it. If you are at all interested in entrepreneurship, you should read it. If you have a son or a grandson or a nephew who’s starting high school, or finishing high school, and you’re looking for a present to mark the occasion – then this is the book to go with.

In a moment, I’ll try to do justice to the “other writings” – the letters and pamphlets on politics, ethics, business, and science – that are often published at the back of each edition of the Autobiography. In the meantime, if you enjoy reading Twilight Patriot and haven’t subscribed already, you should – it’s free, and you’ll get a notification whenever I drop a new post.

Subscribe now

Alan Houston’s 2004 edition, titled The Autobiography and other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue, is notable for what it leaves out – Franklin’s scientific writings, which I will return to later. In Houston’s volume, almost as soon as we readers are finished with the Autobiography, we are plunged into a lengthy tract entitled A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency.

As the proprietor of one of the few printinghouses that served young Philadelphia, Franklin obviously published far more things than anyone but a dedicated Franklin scholar will get around to reading in one lifetime. But the “Paper Currency” pamphlet mattered a bit more to him than most of the others – since he was the only printer skilled enough to produce notes with the fancy decorations that protected against counterfeiting, he was quite interested in seeing his faction prevail in the debate over whether to issue them. And controversies like this were a staple of political life in the young colonies, where gold and silver were scarce due to the mercantilist laws with which parliament tried to keep as much coin as possible in Britain.

We next get an Apology for Printers, dated 10 June 1731, in which Franklin complains of the “peculiar Unhappiness” of a business in which he can seldom print one customer’s writings without offending someone else (“That the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces… That the Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions…”). He exhorts his readers to have more patience with him, repeats Aesop’s fable of the old man travelling with his son and his ass, and finally concludes that “I shall continue my Business. I shall not burn my Press and melt my Letters.”

We also get to read the rules of the Junto club, a fictitious Dialogue Between Two Presbyterians published during the Hemphill controversy, and Benjamin’s 13 April 1738 letter to his parents, Josiah and Abiah Franklin, in which he tries (likely without success) to persuade them not to worry about the particulars of his religious beliefs so long as he lives virtuously:

“…If it were a thing possible for one to alter his Opinions in order to please others, I know none whom I ought more willingly to oblige in that respect than your selves: But since it is no more in a Man’s Power to think than to look like another, methinks all that should be expected from me is to keep my Mind open to Conviction… What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know; the Truth is, I make such Distinctions very little my Study; I think vital Religion has always suffer’d, when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue.…”

This letter is also the only place in the volume where Franklin’s Freemasonry is mentioned:

“…As to the Freemasons, unless she will believe me when I assure her that they are in general a very harmless sort of People; and have no principles or Practices that are inconsistent with Religion or good Manners, I know no Way of giving my Mother a better Opinion of them than she seems to have at present (since it is not allow’d that Women should be admitted into that secret Society.)”

(That Franklin, after being initiated into the Craft in 1731, would become Grandmaster of Pennsylvania’s Masons by 1734 is just one more testament of his remarkable zest for leadership.)

Other works published in this volume have titles like A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America, and Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in America (the latter being the plan for the Public Academy that eventually grew into the University of Pennsylvania). There is the Albany Plan of Union – the proposal by Franklin and some other leading Americans, at the beginning of the French and Indian War, that the colonies should establish a common governing council with its own taxing, spending, and army-raising powers. (Despite inspiring the famous “Join-or-Die” cartoon, this plan was never acted upon.)

More letters and essays on various topics fill out the remainder of Franklin’s public life, from his Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (a 1748 lecture on frugality and thrift), to various letters and pamphlets he wrote in Britain during his long stay as the colonies’ representative in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, all the way to his 1787 speeches to the Constitutional Convention after his return from France. Indeed Houston’s volume contains 44 “Other Writings” of various shapes and sizes, and there is no way for me to describe them all.

As one would expect from such a long-lived man, Franklin’s attitudes change somewhat throughout the collection. Partly this is a matter of his growing stature in the world – from an up-and-coming citizen concerned with affairs of a single city, to the chief representative of the whole American nation. But we also see changes in his attitude to slavery: the first edition of his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. argues that America can’t become wealthy by importing slaves and gives, among other reasons, “almost every Slave being by Nature a Thief.” In the second edition he changes this to “almost every Slave being, from the Nature of Slavery, a Thief.”

After visiting “the Negro School” in Philadelphia in 1763 and seeing the free blacks there, Franklin admitted to having “conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained.” In all respects the black students were “equal to that of white Children.” By the end of his life he was fully committed to abolitionism, and the final document in Houston’s collection is Franklin’s satirical letter of March 1790, written about a month before his death, which purports to be a lengthy speech by an Algerian statesman in defense of the Moorish trade in Christian slaves, though all the arguments were, mutatis mutandis, the same ones made by Americans involved in the African slave trade:

“…If we then cease taking and plundering the Infidel Ships, and making Slaves of the Seamen and Passengers, our Lands will become of no Value for want of Cultivation; the Rents of Houses in the City will sink one half; and the Revenues of Government arising from its Share of Prizes be totally destroy’d! And for what? To gratify the whims of a whimsical Sect, who would have us, not only forbear making more Slaves, but even to manumit those we have….

“Are not Spain, Portugal, France, and the Italian states govern’d by Despots, who hold all their Subjects in Slavery, without Exception? Is their Condition then made worse by their falling into our Hands?... No; they have only exchanged one Slavery for another, and I may say a better; for here they are brought into a land where the Sun of Islamism gives forth its Light, and shines in full Splendor, and they have an Opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true Doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal Souls.…”

One thing that will become clear as one reads Franklin’s political writings is that neither he, nor most of his contemporaries, were the proto-libertarians of common caricature. In nearly all of his more local controversies, Franklin came down on the side of those who wanted to raise new taxes to provide public goods for Pennsylvania – everything from militia companies, to frontier forts, to a public hospital, to street lamps. He mocked people who complained about these taxes while overlooking needless expenses in their own lives – such as by griping about candle taxes while sleeping in past dawn, seeming to not have noticed that the sun “gives light as soon as he rises!” “We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly,” as Poor Richard says.

Franklin had no sympathy for frontiersmen who debauched the American Indians by carrying on the illegal rum trade, and at times he even defended sumptuary laws. He was not, by temperament, any sort of rebel. But he was a patriot, and by 1775 he had seen too much of the contempt that Britain’s Parliament and high society had for his native land – how despite all the hardships that the colonists had borne to plant Britain’s flag on new soil and expand their mother country’s dominions, they and their assemblies would never be accepted as full participants in the British Empire. Thus he was moved to complain, in Causes of the American Discontents Before 1768, of:

“…how lightly the interest of all America had been esteemed here, when the interest of a few inhabitants of Great Britain happened to have the smallest competition with it…. It is of no importance to the common welfare of the Empire, whether a subject gets his living by making hats on this or that side of the water; yet the Hatters of England have prevailed so far to obtain an Act in their own favour, restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beaver to England to be manufactured, and purchase back that hats loaded with the charges of a double transportation. In the same manner have a few Nail-makers, and still a smaller body of Steel-makers (perhaps there are not half a dozen of these in England) prevailed totally to forbid, by an act of Parliament, the erection of slitting-mills and steel-furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools from these artificers under the same disadvantages…”

By the beginning of 1775, Benjamin Franklin had spent 16 of his last 18 years living in England. He had toured the old country, been fêted everywhere for his scientific work, welcomed into the ranks of high society, and comfortably lodged in some mansion or other in every place he happened to go. But when battle was joined, he found himself back in America. The next winter he spent his 70^th birthday on a cold northward march through the Ticonderoga wilderness, sent by Congress to report on the military situation after Montgomery’s expedition to Canada; the summer after that he was back with the Congress in Philadelphia, putting his name to the Declaration of Independence, and the next year he was sailing for France.

What kind of society, then, was Franklin fighting for, if not a libertarian one? Read enough of his writings, and it becomes clear: Laws should be enacted by representatives of the people, and they should serve the public good and not a factional interest. Men should be respected for what they become through their hard work, and not for accidents of birth. The state should not elevate idlers to an equal status with industrious men, but at the same time the wealthy shouldn’t begrudge the payment of taxes, since after all a man of property like himself could only arise in an orderly and well-governed society (a woodland Indian, whatever his qualities as an individual, would at best possess a few blankets and his hunting tools.) Government should be neutral in matters of religious doctrine but not in public morality. And most governing should be local, with the citizens of each colony or state free to pursue differing ideas about the public good, while immigration from place to place (as in the teenage Franklin’s flight from Boston to Philadelphia) gives each citizen the freedom to find a place where he feels most at home.

The Houston volume is a good general introduction to Franklin’s thought, with one glaring exception – it entirely omits Franklin’s scientific writings. While Franklin is not quite on a level with epoch-defining thinkers like Newton, Halley, Linnaeus, or Herschel, he shines very brightly in the constellation of hundreds of amateur scientists whose letters to the Royal Society kept science moving steadily forward during the 18^th century: that marvelous time when mankind first fully grasped the idea that experiments – performed by anyone curious enough and clever enough to think them up, carry them out, and write about the results – were the high road to knowledge.

Nathan G. Goodman’s volume The Ingenious Dr. Franklin – Selected Scientific Letters of Benjamin Franklin is a good introduction to this man’s contribution to physics. And I say physics for a reason – Franklin’s accomplishments include not only his famous work on lightning and electricity but also a number of useful observations and experiments in fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and acoustics. (His attempts at doing biology were less fruitful – on multiple occasions he defends a theory that not only an animal’s metabolism but also its aging can be totally suspended if it’s blocked from exchanging fluids with the environment, so for instance flies sealed in wine bottles or toads buried in clay can be revived years or even centuries later.)

Benjamin Franklin is well known for demonstrating, in his famous 1752 kite experiment, that lightning is caused by electricity, though the vulgar belief that the lightning actually struck his kite is not true – the idea behind both the kite and the lightning rod is to draw electricity down from the cloud gradually so that a big enough charge difference for lightning never builds up.

Franklin also deserves credit for discovering positive and negative electrical charges – he realized, early on in his experiments with the glass static generators and Leyden jar capacitors he had purchased from Europe, that neither of two then-competing ideas about electricity were quite true. Not all electric charges were the same, but neither were they two fully distinct fluids – the “vitreous electricity” and “resinous electricity” that accumulated on glass and amber, respectively. Instead, the electric charge existed everywhere, but in most objects it was perfectly balanced; disturbing the balance created equal and opposite charges, and the tendency of positive and negative to reunite was responsible for all the electrical phenomena he observed, from sparks and lightning to electrostatic attraction.

In Goodman’s volume, one can also read about the “theory of points,” by which electrical conductors are best able to draw or shoot off sparks when sharpened to a fine point – hence Franklin’s recommendation that lightning rods be given a gilt tip, so as not to be blunted by rust. Also, (having long since forgotten his youthful vegetarianism), he gives detailed instructions for slaughtering animals with electricity, and argues that their meat will taste better this way – “The flesh of animals, fresh killed in the usual way, is firm, hard, and not in a very eatable state, because the particles adhere too forcibly to each other.”

The turkey, alas, is not spared. Long before Franklin’s famous letter to his daughter in which he argued that this bird would make a better national symbol than the bald eagle, he had already electrocuted several of them while preparing feasts for his Philadelphia friends. Indeed on one occasion he writes that

“I have lately made an Experiment in Electricity that I desire never to repeat. Two nights ago being about to kill a Turkey by the Shock from two large Glass Jarrs containing as much electrical fire as forty common Phials, I inadvertently took the whole thro' my own Arms and Body.”

Beyond electricity, we can read detailed accounts of Franklin’s experiments in fluid dynamics. These included pouring oil onto ponds to study the way that the thin film of oil calms the ripples which had formerly been raised by the wind, and using a pully to draw a little boat through a channel with uniform force, to study the way that the depth of the water affects the drag – an important problem in canal engineering. He also had an excellent intuitive grasp of the way that hot gasses move near a fire, which enabled him to design the famous Pennsylvania Fireplace or “Franklin Stove” in which hot air, moving through an inverted siphon, dissipates most of its heat into the house while still carrying the smoke away in the chimney. (Franklin also made an improved design for street lamps, in which the circulating air is so channeled to deposit hardly any soot on the glass panels.)

Sometimes, though, Franklin the scientist had no answers, and had to content himself with simply describing a phenomenon that had piqued his curiosity. This was the theme of his 1762 letter to John Pringle, about the peculiar behavior of a lamp, made from a glass jar with water in its bottom and oil floating atop the water, as it swung about in a ship’s cabin on a wavy sea:

“At supper, looking on the lamp, I remarked that tho’ the surface of the oil was perfectly tranquil, and duly preserved its position and distance with regard to the brim of the glass, the water under the oil was in great commotion, rising and falling in irregular waves, which continued during the whole evening. The lamp was kept burning as a watch light all night, till the oil was spent, and the water only remain’d. In the morning I observed, that though the motion of the ship continued the same; the water was now quiet, and its surface as tranquil as that of the oil had been the evening before. At night again, when oil was put upon it, the water resumed its irregular motions, rising in high waves almost to the surface of the oil, but without disturbing the smooth level of that surface. And this was repeated every day during the voyage.”

Franklin was also curious about what we now call thermodynamics. He studied heat conduction, and the way that objects as diverse as wood, leaves, stone, metal, or black and white cloth responded to the sun’s radiance. He also made a number of experiments with evaporative cooling, measuring the way that fluids cooled the surfaces from which they were vaporized, how this effect could be strengthened by blowing with a bellows, and how some fluids were stronger coolants than others – ethanol or “spirits” exceeded water, and was in turn exceed by ether. By blowing on a thermometer bulb covered in ether, Franklin cooled it from 65°F to 7°F, remarking that

“The ice continued increasing till we ended the experiment, when it appeared near a quarter of an inch thick all over the ball, with a number of small spicula, pointing outwards. From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.”

Other letters include first-hand accounts of the earliest manned balloon flights, undertaken in Paris near the end of Franklin’s ambassadorship, as well as scattered observations on clouds, thunderstorms, waterspouts, artesian springs, and marsh gas. He even made his own very small contribution to the growing consensus about lead poisoning, by sharing anecdotes about printers’ hands growing impaired by too often handling hot lead type.

More interesting is his detailed description of the glass harmonica, a musical instrument that he invented by placing a series of rotating glass bowls end-to-end, to mimic the sound of water-filled musical glasses in an easy-to-play, keyboard-like form. The harmonica enjoyed a brief burst of popularity all over Europe, and even Mozart wrote a few compositions for it.

Franklin’s scientific writings also have their humorous and whimsical moments. For instance, he ends his 1773 letter to Barbeau Debourg, on his (mistaken) observation that flies accidentally trapped in wine can be revived years later by the touch of sunlight, by saying:

“I wish it were possible, from this instance, to invent a method of embalming drowned persons in such a manner that they may be recalled to life at any period, however distant; for having a very ardent desire to see and observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to any ordinary death the being immersed in a cask of Madeira wine with a few friends till that time, to be then recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But since in all probability we live in an age too early and too near the infancy of science, to hope to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection, I must for the present content myself with the treat, which you are so kind as to promise me, of the resurrection of a fowl or a turkey cock.”

By that standard, science is still in its “infancy” today, since cryopreservation (at least for human beings) is still a method of extracting money from the gullible rich rather than recalling their frozen corpses to life. Though aspiring filmmakers should take note: there may yet be a masterpiece of comedy to be made about Benjamin Franklin waking up in the 21^st century when someone unwittingly opens his wine cask, and gives the old man a chance to live out his own version of Idiocracy.

In the meantime, if you’re an American patriot who admires our founding fathers, who wants to see what the world looked like through their eyes, and who aspires to imitate their virtues, then you can hardly do better than to pick up a volume of Benjamin Franklin’s writings, and get to know this remarkable man in his own words.

The first half of this article, dealing with the Autobiography, originally appeared at the American Thinker.

About half of what I post here at Twilight Patriot consists of articles written for a website called the American Thinker. On the one hand, I will always be grateful to the Thinker for providing me with a much larger readership than I could have gotten on my own.

But there are two big limitations to writing for the Thinker. First, I can’t go much longer than 2000 words; second, it’s very hard to get away with speaking ill of Republicans in general, or Donald Trump in particular. (The one time I got an outright rejection from the Thinker was for my 2021 article Drafting Women, or How America is Ruled by Moderate Republicans, in which I claimed that people like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Roberts were the real gatekeepers who usually decided how much of the leftist agenda became law.)

Since I intend to violate both these limits today, I have decided to post this article directly to my Substack. You, dear readers, are the first people who get to see it – the first people who get to read my first big criticism of Trump 2.0. Because Trump and MAGA aren’t immune to the dumb scapegoating habits that often afflict populist movements, and because we can’t restore American greatness by obsessing over foreigners.

The Liberation Day That Wasn’t

As I write this, America is dealing with the second week of fallout from Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Speculation abounded – could the economy withstand a $835 billion tax hike? Why are countries like Switzerland, which does not have protective tariffs against the US, getting hit with a “reciprocal tariff”? Why did that big, beautiful list of impacted countries – you know, the one that Trump waved above his head in the Rose Garden – include uninhabited penguin islands? Is Trump really trying to eliminate not just the overall trade deficit, but the deficit with every single country? Why would anyone do that? Does he even know what a “reciprocal tariff” is? Did he calculate the rates with a formula provided by ChatGPT? And so forth.

Then, one week later, the President signed another executive order suspending all of the tariffs for the next ninety days – except for the tariffs on China: “Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately.”

The NASDAQ, which had fallen about 13 percent since 2 April, climbed up to just 2.8 percent short of its pre-Liberation Day value. Trump’s supporters are now lauding him for a successful show of strength that got other countries to respect him again, while his enemies still believe that he’s an unhinged egotistical chaos agent and that the stock market will probably crash many more times before he’s done whatever he’s doing.

Notice, however, what is being overlooked while Trump flails about with his tariffs. The United States ranked second-worst (Zambia was in last place) in this recent S&P500 survey on development time for new mines in various countries. This is due in large part to procedural environmental laws: instead of simply putting a statutory limit on the amount of pollution that a mine can produce and giving government agencies the power to enforce the limit (as most countries in Europe and Asia do) US laws allow anyone and everyone to sue to halt construction on mines until the mining company proves in court that it’s not harming the environment, or violating indigenous people’s rights, or violating… well, it’s got to be violating something; there is no presumption of innocence here.

Since there are 829 federal judges, any one of whom can halt work on any mine at any stage of construction, with the burden being on the mine’s owners to prove their own innocence, few new mines get opened. The long wait times and the uncertainty make them a bad investment, so investors take their money to other countries instead, which is why Australia and Canada, despite their much smaller populations compared to the US, have the world’s two largest mine industries.

Similar legal hurdles have scuppered numerous attempts to build pipelines, powerlines, transit systems, ferries, and powerplants (fossil and nuclear and even wind and solar), as well as every American project to build high speed rail (remember when California approved high speed rail in a 2008 referendum, and spent $28.2 Billion over the next 16 years without a single mile of track being laid? Meanwhile Morocco, for about $5.4 billion, managed to lay 201 miles of track between 2010 and 2018 and has plans to keep building more.)

Then there is the matter of housing: why do American renters in the bottom income quintile spend an average of 74.8% of their income on rent, compared to 54.9% in Italy and just 31.1% in France? It’s mostly zoning laws that ban multifamily housing from large portions of cities, plus lengthy drawn-out permitting processes, plus (in the bluer states) private lawsuits against real estate developers.

And Donald Trump, despite his outward appearance as a radical, has no concrete plans to change any of this.

Populists and Scapegoats

Who is responsible for the dismal housing situation? A mixture of liberal activists and lawyers, who just hate capitalism and claim that letting rich people build things will ipso facto make the poor poorer, plus middle class people who already own homes, and whose desire to see their home’s value go up for the rest of their life is seen by local governments as some sort of basic human right, which must if necessary be preserved by forcing poor people to pay two or three times the market rate for rent.

Notice who I am not blaming for the housing shortage: immigrants. Notice who I am not blaming for the decline in America’s physical infrastructure and manufacturing plant: foreign competitors.

And in that regard I differ from a lot of Trump supporters, who think that the main cause of the housing shortage is that there are too many Latin American immigrants in the country, and the main cause of the bad job prospects for Americans who work with their hands is that firms from other countries are ripping us off by selling stuff to us.

Despite having some genuine virtues, Donald Trump is ultimately a lowbrow populist. And lowbrow populists know that their audiences want simple stories and convenient villains. The Left likes to blame complex problems on billionaires or bigoted rural hicks. For the Right, it’s foreigners. Immigrants steal our jobs and drive up rents and eat our dogs and cats. Asians manipulate the currency and undercut American manufacturers and create dangerous bat viruses in their labs. Ukrainians siphon off the defence money that should be going to our southern border. And so forth.

(Yes, there really are people in the Trump coalition who were stupid enough to claim that the reason the US-Mexico border was wide open during the Biden years was that the money that should have been spent policing it was going to Ukraine instead. They really expected us to forget, goldfish-like, that the border was open for a long time before Ukraine was invaded, which is no surprise when you remember that the dominant faction within the US government wanted it to be open.)

But anyone who wants a place in Donald Trump’s orbit has to suck up to him by pretending to believe these things – and often the pretence is kept up long enough that the mask grows into the face.

In real life, where our problems aren’t caused primarily by foreigners, this is a very bad thing. After all, if foreigners aren’t the problem, then no amount of emotion directed at foreigners is going to fix the problem – indeed it will just make the problem worse, by diverting attention away from its real causes, and by making the Republican Party (which is still the lesser of two evils) seem odious to people who are intelligent enough to see through the stream of populist balderdash.

Victimhood Culture, Victimhood Nation

Most of the time, it’s liberals who indulge in victimhood culture, and conservatives who understand that victimhood culture is bad. It’s liberals who call for lenience when a youth with abusive or absent parents is caught committing a petty theft, liberals who insist that we have to make up for past racism by bending school discipline standards until black and white students get punished at equal rates, liberals who have implemented the “zero-tolerance policies” toward schoolyard violence that, in practice, allow feral youths to batter and torment girls and smaller boys whenever adults are absent or distracted, since resistance by the other boys would be treated like a common assault.

Now of course the end result of that is the “school-to-prison-pipeline,” in which the sacred victims who are supposed to benefit from all this just grow up to be layabouts and gangbangers and have much worse lives than they would have had if society had expected discipline from them when they were young. (My 2023 essay Clarence Thomas Gets It attacks the racial angle of this problem. It is unfortunate that, these days, more and more people on the Right are so fed up with the Left’s lies about race that they jump to the other extreme, ignore everything that Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell have to say about black crime, and instead blame it on genetics – an explanation that is obviously bunk when you recollect that the African slaves brought to America are nearly the same genetic stock as the inhabitants of the Gold Coast aka Ghana, and that Ghanaian blacks, at present, have about half the homicide rate of American whites.)

And yet, when it comes to international relations, Donald Trump has claimed victimhood culture as his own. If America is manufacturing fewer goods than it used to, then it’s because foreigners are ripping us off. They’re manipulating their currency. They’re using subsidies from their own governments to dump their products on us at prices we can’t compete with. They’re not allowing American merchants equal access to their own markets. They’re stealing our intellectual property. They’re using slave labor. Some of these accusations are true, some of the time (the last two apply especially to China). But none of them are the primary reasons that American manufacturing is uncompetitive.

Think, for a moment, about the mathematical realities behind the trade deficit. If America is importing more stuff than it exports, then it has to be exporting more currency than it imports. This (1) is only possible under a fiat money system, since countries with gold and silver money can’t sustain a prolonged trade deficit, (2) is only possible when the central bank wants it to happen, and emits the proper financial instruments to make it happen, and (3) is required as long as the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and is thus in high demand everywhere – a situation which Donald Trump is upholding via tariff threats, since letting the dollar weaken would fly in the face of his image of American greatness. (Curiously, JD Vance has a much more complete understanding of how all this works, and in earlier years he was on record saying that reviving American manufacturing required a weaker dollar. Unfortunately, becoming Trump’s running mate came at the price of having to hide his light under a bushel.)

In essence, what we see is Donald Trump applying victimhood culture to America as a whole, while his eager base laps it up and begs for more. But the plain truth is that America is still far too strong to be dominated by any foreign country. The problems for American industry in which foreigners have a hand are (1) smaller than the domestically-caused problem and (2) are only possible because interest groups within America benefit from them and lobby for them. (For instance, the finance titans who have actually been setting America’s monetary policy since 1913 benefit greatly from being able to export US currency and financial services all over the globe, even while American manufacturers suffer from low demand due to the same unbalanced cashflows.)

The same is true for problems related to immigration. Housing, for instance, isn’t in short supply because there are too many immigrants (Japan, for instance, is way more densely populated than the US; also, apartments there are cheap because of its simple and predictable zoning and permitting laws.) The main reason housing is expensive is that most middle-class Americans believe themselves entitled to make money simply by owning a house, and will lobby local governments to restrict new construction to the point that rents and home prices steadily rise with time. But the idea that, by doing so, the middle class is mooching off the poor is a political non-starter in America, so (depending on whether you’re on the Left or the Right) the blame goes to either landlords or immigrants.

Also, even when immigrant labourers are here illegally, it’s not because they defied the full force of the American government to get here – it’s because there are factions within America who want them here. And part of the reason they want them here is that there are a lot of essential jobs in agriculture and construction work that most native-born Americans are just too lazy to do.

Americans also like to view the drug trade as another case of foreigners victimizing Americans. But in Mexico (which has suffered much more violence from the cartels) it’s the Americans who are seen as the villains, since it’s American money that provides the cartels with the means and the motivation to do their evil.

In short, the United States is not the kind of country that has anything to gain by adopting a victim mentality. We’re still too powerful to be pushed around from outside. While foreigners can and do take advantage of our weaknesses, the prime movers – banks, environmental lawyers, zoning boards, drug addicts, etc. – are Americans. And without admitting that, we can’t make real progress toward restoring American greatness.

Otherwise, we might well wake up one of these days to find the American flag planted in Greenland… only for its much-talked-about minerals to be even more off-limits than before, due to millions of American lawyers suddenly being empowered to file frivolous lawsuits against anyone who wants to mine them.

What About China?

While Donald Trump suspended most of his Liberation Day tariffs on 9 April, one country just got hit harder – China. Trump’s supporters are generally happy about this, as they view China as America’s biggest adversary, more responsible than anyone else for the pitiful state of our manufacturing plant – and that’s before you remember what happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

I certainly have my criticisms of America’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Indeed I think that this relationship was rotten and lopsided from the beginning – when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon travelled to China, met with Chairman Mao in Mao’s own gardens (not on neutral ground, as is appropriate for equals) and then signed the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué which stated (among other things) that “the United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China….”

Forget for a moment about the diplomatic context of that statement, and just look at the plain meaning of the words. It’s one thing to say that the governments of both the PRC and the Republic of China claim to be the rightful government of all China, of which Taiwan is one province. It’s another thing to say that every last person there – all 878 million of them, including the Taiwanese who were content under Japanese rule and launched a failed uprising after the handover of their island to Chiang Kai-Shek at the end of World War II – believes that. And the idea that it is somehow the responsibility of the US President to speak for “all Chinese” is preposterously ridiculous.

The response of Nixon’s apologists is to simply remind everyone that the One China Principle has been a non-negotiable part of China’s foreign relations since 1949, and is accepted in one way or another by the United Nations and by every nation state more populous than Guatemala.

To which my response is: So what? The actual text of the statement that Nixon signed is a ludicrous falsehood. People repeat it anyway for the same reason that the total state in George Orwell’s 1984 makes people say “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.” It’s not about convincing anyone of its objective truth – it’s about showing everyone who’s boss. Your willingness to say that O’Brian is holding up five fingers, even though you can only see four, is how you show Big Brother that you’re a safe and reliable subject.

And the fact that so many influential people have submitted to the CCP’s humiliation ritual – that they have stated with the utmost formality that there is only one sovereign country called “China” when in real life there are clearly two – doesn’t mean that it’s something other than a humiliation ritual. It just means that it’s a successful humiliation ritual.

What, then, have been the downstream effects of this gesture of submissiveness? Of America’s willingness to say: Having China as a diplomatic and trading partner is just so important that we will toss aside all of our principles in order to make it happen – such as by breaking off diplomatic relations with the Taiwanese even though they have done nothing to deserve this? And we will do this even though China, which has far more to gain economically from this relationship than we do, is making no similar concessions to America?

Well, one consequence was that the Chinese Communists reacted to America’s willingness to accept a relationship where China was the head, and America was the tail, by continuing to act like China was the head, and America was the tail.

This, for instance, explains China’s cavalier attitude toward intellectual property theft. This is no small matter – back in 2018, the US Trade Representative estimated that “Chinese theft of American IP currently costs between $225 billion and $600 billion annually.” (This is roughly the same as the entire value of Chinese goods imported by the US.) As a high-wage, high-innovation country, the United States can’t let itself be treated this way and still prosper. And yet, American firms continue to let their patents get infringed and their trade secrets stolen while the Chinese government winks, since the alternative is to not do business with China at all, and the short-term gains are too big to pass up.

Remember what I said about the consensus that most of the world has reached, that Chinese participation is just so important that principle must be cast aside in order to get it? Well, it didn’t stop with throwing Taiwan out of the UN and banning its athletes from flying their flag at the Olympics.

Another consequence of America’s lopsided relationship with China is that Pakistan and North Korea now have nuclear weapons. Basically, the US and China both signed onto the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), in which they agreed not to assist countries other than the “Big Five” in getting the bomb; the Americans went beyond their duties by not just refusing to assist Taiwan’s nuclear program but actively sabotaging it, while the Chinese repaid this by supplying plutonium, nuclear blueprints, and missile technology to Pakistan and North Korea. The other NNPT countries did nothing to retaliate, since they knew that China, if called out, would just withdraw from the treaty. After all, one has got to remember the basic rule here: China must participate even if every principle is cast aside.

The Covid breakout was hardly any different. Clear-headed scientists and diplomats had been criticizing lax Chinese lab safety protocols for years before things came to a head in Wuhan. China’s mixture of secrecy and a preference for quantity over quality in scientific research – including dangerous gain-of-function research – was quite often recognized as a disaster waiting to happen, and the 2019 Wuhan incident wasn’t even that country’s first deadly lab leak. Meanwhile, the Party had a history of brutally enforced coverups during previous disease outbreaks (Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who warned western authorities about the SARS epidemic in 2003, spent most of his last two decades of life under house arrest.)

Had all of this been happening in a small or medium-sized country, the response of entities like the WHO and CDC would have been to loudly sanction that country and refuse to fund or otherwise have dealings with labs that did hazardous research there. But because China is special (China must participate even if every principle is cast aside) nothing decisive was done, and American virologists continued to collaborate closely with their Chinese counterparts, since there were lucrative careers to be built doing research that was illegal in their own country.

And now, between 18 and 33 million dead people later, prestigious entities like the CIA, FBI, and New York Times are finally admitting that the lab leak is the most likely origin of Covid-19. (But not admitting that close scientific cooperation with China was a mistake all along: China must participate and all that.)

So, after cataloguing all of the ways that Chinese Communists have exploited and humiliated and lied to their American dupes, am I agreed with the typical Trump narrative of China as big bad villain and the United States as innocent victim? Not quite.

Because the key thing to remember is that China has never been strong enough to force any of this on America. (Do you remember that time when Chinese marines landed on Waikiki Beach and demanded that the US relax its patent laws and send more money to the Wuhan labs? Neither do I.)

In short, America’s long history of being a pushover with respect to China is a history of American interest groups sucking up to Beijing in the hopes of getting some short-term reward for their bootlicking. The Shanghai Communiqué happened because Tricky Dick Nixon wanted to take credit for the Sino-Soviet Split after it had already happened, and he wrongly believed that his quasi-alliance with Mao would help him win the Vietnam War.

Even with Nixon gone and Saigon fallen, the US under Carter followed through on Nixon’s plans because, at that point, there were too many “China-hands” in the State Department whose jobs depended on it, and who were now claiming that being friendly with China would cause China to liberalize. (There was also a race angle: right-wing racists were willing to overlook the massacres carried out by the PRC and its Khmer clients because they didn’t view their victims as morally equal to the white victims of Russian communism, while left-wing racists overlooked the same massacres because they couldn’t take non-white people seriously as oppressors.)

When the hoped-for liberalization didn’t happen – when it was the USSR and its satellites, i.e. the bloc that the US had kept resisting, that liberalized in 1989, while China massacred its protestors instead – did the Americans re-evaluate their theory? Did they admit that Deng Xiaoping might have actually meant what he said when he told the Party, over and over again, that “reform and opening up” meant temporarily easing restrictions on entrepreneurship and trade, while keeping the other elements of the totalitarian system firmly in place, until the country had “modernized” and was strong enough to return to a purer form of socialism while also dominating its rivals in international affairs?

Surely you jest. What actually happened was that America’s monied elites, who by this time had major business connections with China, kept up the charade that every surrender to China on a matter of principle was somehow bringing China into the West’s cultural orbit. And what were the fruits of this? America losing $225 to $600 billion each year in stolen IP, formerly prosperous towns in the Midwest rusting away while their inhabitants died by suicide or overdose because they couldn’t compete with Chinese slave labor, and then, to top it all off, Covid-19.

But at no point was America truly victimized from without. The American business executives who knew that putting their factories in China would mean getting their trade secrets stolen, but did it anyone, were not acting with a gun to their heads – they just weren’t thinking past the next quarterly earnings report. Likewise, a lot of American scientists, for whom professional success meant publishing lots of virology papers, had realized that this could be done faster and cheaper if they partnered up with a country that didn’t value human life as much as their own.

At every point, America – or, to speak properly, elite factions within America – had most of the agency. All of the concessions that they made to China also served their own short-term political, economic, or professional interests. These are the interest groups toward which right-wing Americans should be directing their ire. After all, the US Congress never had the power to impeach Xi Jinping, but its failure to impeach NIAID director Anthony Fauci for lying under oath about gain-of-function research is inexcusable.

What It All Means

At the moment I’m writing this, Donald Trump is more firmly in control of the Republican Party than ever. No matter what he does, the great bulk of Republicans, from the grass-roots on up, will cheer it on, and shun anyone who criticizes it.

Is Trump putting tariffs on China alone? Good – we need to crack down on our number one rival! Is he tariffing democracies like Germany and Japan too? Good – we pay for those countries’ defense, and we can’t put up with any more freeloading. Is he removing the tariffs? Good – it means they’ve fulfilled their purpose and other countries respect us now. Did all of this make the stock market crash? So be it – Americans who love their country should be willing to live with less baubles if that’s what it takes to restore domestic industry. Did the stock market do a quick turnaround? Good – that means that Trump’s critics are blowing smoke when they say that he’s bad for the economy.

Now, I am fully aware of the good things that President Trump has done. I have written repeatedly about how, if you judge him by his actions rather than his words, he is (among other things) the most anti-war president since Carter, and the only pro-life president we’ve actually had since abortion became a political issue. I voted for him all three times that he ran, and I wrote a Fourth-of-July post last year about how picking Trump, the chaos agent, over Biden/Harris and the slow but certain slide into despotism, was the only way to be true to the moral example that the Founding Fathers left for us.

And yet, despite all this, there’s no getting around the fact that, since 20 January of this year, America’s executive branch has been run by an old, venal reality-TV star surrounded by a crazed personality cult. All things considered, I would much rather have Rand Paul as president, and indeed if he runs in the 2028 primaries I will gladly campaign and vote for him.

Rand Paul, after all, has been standing up for all the good parts of Trumpistry much longer and more consistently than Trump himself. Paul has always wanted less US involvement in the Middle East; with Trump it has been two-steps-forward, one-step-back. Paul attacked the covid lockdowns from the beginning and has tried to get Congress to actually investigate and punish the dishonesty around gain-of-function research; Trump flailed about helplessly during the first year of the pandemic, and let Anthony Fauci and his associates wield power under his watch. Paul wants to bring back the gold standard because he understands the relationship between monetary policy and trade deficits; Trump seems to think that tariffs are a hammer and every economic problem is a nail; Paul refuses to blame foreigners for our economic woes, and he actually wants to shrink the burdens of environmental laws and labour laws and zoning laws and private litigation that have made American housing scarce and American industry uncompetitive; Trump seems to think that tariffs are… well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the crowds are still with Trump, for now. They like the simple stories where Americans are being victimized by foreign scapegoats. And the popularity of these simple stories puts hard limits on how much the MAGA movement can accomplish in the real world.

Hence my declinist worldview, and my lack of enthusiasm (compared to many of the people that I know) for Trump, MAGA, DOGE, the National Conservativism movement, and most of the other components of the New Right. There are reasons to be happy that Trump won in November, but in the long run, anything really good that happens will start with forward-thinking Americans taking more responsibility for their own families and communities, knowing full well that America as a whole is in for dark days ahead, no matter who wins in partisan politics.

What is meant by the spoliation of American popular culture? Alexander Macris, author of the right-wing Substack Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, thinks he has an answer. Here is how he explains it in a post from October of 2021, occasioned by DC Comics’ decision to alter Superman’s motto from “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” to “Truth, Justice, and a Better World.”

Spoliation means “incorporating art into a setting culturally or chronologically different from that of its creation.” The term derives from Classical Latin word spolium, a singular noun which literally means “the skin or hide stripped from an animal.” The plural, spolia, came into figurative use by Latin writers such as Cicero to refer to plunder, from which we derive the English phrase “the spoils of war.” Whenever the Romans conquered a nation, they brought back war trophies as proof of their victory…

In contemporary usage, spoliation is “a practice consisting of a transference of power from the past through a taking over of its cultural expressions and incorporating them into one’s own. The purpose of appropriation [is] to convert the object of appropriation to one’s own purposes…

Spoliation, then, works like this:

1. A conqueror defeats a rival.

2. The conqueror identifies the defeated rival’s most valuable cultural expressions (artwork, artifacts, buildings, monuments, stories, etc.).

3. The conqueror appropriates those expressions and reuses them in its own cultural expressions, thereby transferring power to itself.

Does that process seem familiar? It should….

Macris certainly isn’t the first person to complain about the way that left-wing politics leads to bad art. Nor is he the first to notice that wokesters – unable to create good art themselves – have settled for spoliating the products of an earlier, more creative era, with (for instance) the all-female Ghostbusters remake that flopped back in 2016, or Amazon’s Rings of Power series with its wildly implausible handling of race (over and over again you see a black or Asian elf, hobbit, or dwarf popping up in an otherwise-white village with no explanation.) And that’s before I even get into the woke values of the remakes. I could go on, but it would be tedious, and I trust that my readers get the point.

What is one to do? Unfortunately, one of the commonest responses of right-wingers is simply to complain. But this isn’t everyone’s response. Macris himself prefers “counter-spoliation.” (“Fighting Back in the Culture War Means Creating a New Pop Culture.”)

And Macris has lived by his own principles. By now he is the lead designer of several board games, as well as two tabletop role-playing games with a dozen manuals between them, each comprising about five hundred pages of lore and combat mechanics. By his own confession, the Adventurer Conqueror King System is his masterpiece, but the work I’ll be reviewing today is the graphic novel Star Spangled Squadron, written to accompany Ascendent, his second most ambitious RPG.

Ascendent: Star Spangled Squadron is set in a world where, beginning around the year 2016, a select few men and women have “ascended” – that is, suddenly developed superhuman powers. This can happen in response to drugs in a top secret military program, but it can also happen ‘in the wild’ at moments of extreme hardship.

The people who come out of this process are technically called “humans of mass destruction.” But the US military, which is assembling its own ascendent team as the story begins, is cagey about using this term in public. Basically, they’ve realized that somebody will need to protect the American public from rogue and foreign HMDs. And while dressing those somebodies in ordinary military uniforms and playing their role straight would frighten and perhaps disgust the citizens of western democracies, having them wear capes instead and work under code-names like “Dr. Quantum” or “American Eagle” would be a lot more agreeable, whatwith everyone being used to superheroes acting like that in comic-books. (Not only this premise, but also a great many of the jokes in the series, are meant as satires on the way that media influences reality.)

Star Spangled Squadron picks up in a secret military lab beneath Fort Leavenworth Maximum Security Prison, where we meet our first supervillain – a disgraced former soldier doing a life sentence for crimes committed in Iraq, who has volunteered to be experimented upon as part of “Project Ascendent.” After being injected with some controlled substances, the soldier wakes up as… Manticore. A literal manticore, with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion.

After a brutal fight in which 412 people are killed and 704 injured (passed off as a “bombing” in the press), Manticore is stunned by a missile launched from a helicopter. The authorities consider finishing him off, but decide to transport him to Guantánamo Bay instead, whence he soon escapes. Manticore then goes rampaging in downtown Atlanta before coming face to face with our first hero, American Eagle.

Here is how Macris describes American Eagle, in a podcast with Thomas Umstattd of Author Media where the two men are discussing “post-modern subversion fatigue:”

[American Eagle is] a firefighter whose superpowers manifest while he’s rescuing children from a burning school. He’s a married Christian father of two who coaches Little League, and when his powers develop, he goes and loyally serves the U.S. Government.

Readers often ask me, “Okay, what’s the twist?”

My response is, “The plot twist is that there’s no plot twist. He’s simply a good dude who loves his family, his wife, and his country.” To my surprise, when I polled readers, he was the number one most popular character in the book.

I have other characters like the sexy bad girl, the wisecracker, and the antihero, but American Eagle was the guy people loved.

After the battle between Manticore and American Eagle, the readers are introduced to the rest of the Star Spangled Squadron. There’s Stilleto, the “sexy bad girl,” plus the aforementioned Dr. Quantum, as well as Stronghold, Warp, and Aurora. (Aurora is a gorgeous, somewhat ditzy blonde model who, when asked what her power is, simply says “I’m a star.” She turns out to be, in my opinion, the funniest character in the story.)

The members of the Squadron all dress like classic superheroes, but they’re under military command, since each of the six is a commissioned officer in the United States Coast Guard. (“…because the Coast Guard is the only Armed Service that can fight overseas and also enforce laws domestically. This instantly makes the US Coast Guard the most powerful and prestigious armed service in the world.”)

The story follows the Star Spangled Squadron as they prepares for and fight an even bigger battle with a group of villainous Humans of Mass Destruction who have taken over Area 51. All of the common superhero tropes show up. (If you were looking for a highly-original, high-brow work of literature… this is not it.)

The villains also have their own backstories, though you’ll have to look for them in the RPG manual, not the graphic novel. (For instance, Free Radical is “an anti-nuclear activist who developed nuclear powers after being exposed to a meltdown and is now a self-hating nuclear-powered anti-nuclear activist.”)

The main differences between Macris’ work, and the stuff that Marvel and DC Comics are putting out these days, are that (1) The jokes are unwoke, and therefore much funnier, and (2) the whole series is written with a solidly conservative subtext, where the heroes are patriots who believe that America is worth defending, but are also level-headed enough to realize that incompetence and hare-brained ideologies within their own government are often a bigger problem than foreign threats.

Readers who finish Star Spangled Squadron, and who want to experience more of Macris’ creation, will have no trouble finding it – if they purchase the Ascendent role-playing game with its 496-page manual full of art, detailed game mechanics, and lore. Here is how Macris described it, in another podcast with Umstattd:

In my business, Autarch, we create tabletop role-playing games that compete with Dungeons and Dragons, and we publish graphic novels. These graphic novels are set in the same universe as our role-playing games. When I set out to create my most recent role-playing game, Ascendant, which is a superhero-themed game, I decided to build an entire comic book universe around it.

The game itself uses logarithmic math, allowing players to scale to any superhero power level. It’s very detailed and “crunchy,” with tables and quantized stats for everything. When I started working on this game, people thought I was crazy because most big publishers were shifting toward a female audience, making games more narrative-driven, story-focused, and softer, [but in] my game… everything is quantified. For example, you can say that American Eagle can lift exactly a certain amount, throw it a specific distance, and at a defined speed.

When I released Ascendant, it became an instant number-one bestseller on DriveThruRPG and my most successful Kickstarter to date. It’s even spawned two graphic novels. Similarly, my tabletop role-playing game, Adventure Conqueror King System, also goes against the grain. It’s set in a fantasy version of Rome called the Arn Empire and is highly detailed with robust economic systems and military tactics. You can play it as a war game on the table or as a traditional RPG. This is completely contrary to the direction companies like Wizards of the Coast are taking, which focuses on making games easier to access by reducing complexity and emphasizing the story. I chose the opposite approach, and it led to a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign.

(This market success is all the more impressive when you consider that Macris’ right-wing politics have gotten him blacklisted by a lot of respectable retailers, and even the gaming forum RPGnet and the RPG subreddit have banned any mentions of the games he has worked on.)

All of Alexander Macris’ creations follow the ideals of an artistic movement called Romantic Realism, where good art is “awe-inspiring, alluring, beautiful, heroic, majestic, sensual, and sublime,” and bad art is “cynical, deconstructive, demoralizing, dispiriting, and/or ugly.” While he sympathizes with the Respectable Realism that dominated American mass media in the mid-20^th century (the era of Norman Rockwell, the Hays Code, and the Comic Code) he thinks that that style was only suitable for the kind of high-trust society that we no longer have, and that, nowadays, Romantic Realism is the only alternative to the Transgressive Realism and the even worse Dystrophic Realism that became dominant as the Left won the culture wars. (If you don’t know what those phrases mean, it’s because you haven’t read Macris’ lengthy 2024 essay “A Digression into Aesthetics.”)

If you’re reading this, and you happen to enjoy superhero stories or tabletop fantasy games, then you should definitely check out Alexander Macris’ oeuvre. But there’s also a good chance that you are the kind of person who is bored out of his mind by that kind of pop culture, who deems superhero comics and perhaps even graphic novels in general incredibly trashy, and who wouldn’t even dream of interacting with a twenty-sided die.

In that case, you should think long and hard about what kinds of cultural products you do like – and then find “counter-spoliators” who work in those genres, and support their work. Or, better yet, follow Alexander Macris’ example and create art and literature of your own.

The results of last year’s elections – plus the extreme tepidness of the Left’s protests against the second Trump administration when compared to what happened back in 2016 and 2017 – have shown that most Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ entire worldview, and want something different. But right-wing politics can’t win in a vacuum. People don’t just need good laws and good government; they also need stories to tell and heroes to admire. And the future belongs to those who do the work of providing these things.

A shorter version of this essay appears at the American Thinker.

Prompt: Alan Turing contemplating a thinking machine by the light of a third quarter moon.

Recently, I have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Alexander Macris, a right-wing entrepreneur, the founder of the Autarch LLC game design studio, and the author of a fine substack called Contemplations on the Tree of Woe. Any conservative or reactionary American who is interested in thinking deeply about his country’s future should subscribe to it; indeed what makes it so fun to read is that you never know what the Contemplator is going to contemplate next: it could be the frantic and futile attempts of the Democrats to stop Donald Trump from winning a second term, or the economic theories of C. H. Douglas, or the reasons that left-coded pop culture is failing so badly, or the indigenous monotheisms that competed for adherents in Greece and Rome before the rise of Christianity, or the reasons why the entire concept of gross domestic product is a fraud, or the question of whether or not the Americans who live a thousand years from now will be interested in colonizing outer space.

But today, Alexander did me the kindness of choosing one of my recent essays as his guest post. The piece is titled “Why Artificial Intelligence Imitates Only a Small Part of the Human Mind,” and it explores my reasons for not fearing an AI takeover in much greater detail than is possible when I’m writing for a low-brow publication like the American Thinker. I’ll be posting Part I below, but those of you who wish to read the full essay will need to follow the link to the Tree of Woe blog in order to finish it.

Part I - Can Machines Think?

At this moment, many of the world’s most eminent minds are pondering the same question with which Alan Turing opened his classic 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Turing, who asserted that the words “machine” and “think” are (as commonly used) too vague to admit of an answer, proposed that machine intelligence be instead measured by what we now know as a “Turing Test,” but which he himself called the “Imitation Game.” When a computer can imitate a human being well enough that an interlocuter, after holding conversations with both the computer and an actual human being, can’t tell which is which, the computer has won the game.

Has the simple idea behind the Turing Test allowed the AI researchers of today to come to any sort of consensus about how close they are to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)? Not in the slightest.

The three men who shared the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning, and who are commonly known as the “Godfathers of Deep Learning,” are Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun. Hinton, who in 2023 left Google so he could speak more freely about AI risks, has said there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI will lead to human extinction in the next three decades. Bengio put the “probability of doom” at 20 percent. LeCun, on the other hand, says that the AI extinction risk is “preposterously ridiculous,” and “below the chances of an asteroid hitting the earth,” since even the best large language models (LLMs) are less intelligent than a housecat. “A cat can remember, can understand the physical world, can plan complex actions, can do some level of reasoning—actually much better than the biggest LLMs.”

Meanwhile, professional researchers on AI safety, risk, and “alignment” often put the chance of catastrophe much higher – Jan Leike, the OpenAI Alignment Team leader, says it’s somewhere between 10 and 90 percent, and Roman Yampolskiy, AI safety researcher and director of the Cyber Security Laboratory at the University of Louisville, puts it at 99.999999 percent.

All of this naturally makes one think of Franklin Roosevelt’s quip during one of his radio addresses that “there are as many opinions as there are experts.”

Fortunately, I don’t think that non-AI-experts need to throw their hands up in defeat, and act as if each of these people has an equal chance of being right. Alan Turing’s Imitation Game, if played creatively and intelligently, will give even a person of average ability the tools that he or she needs to show just how big the gulf between human and AI intelligence still is. At the very least, I can say that my own interactions with AI have convinced me that Yann LeCun, the man who says that cats are still smarter than the best LLMs, knows what he’s talking about.

Part II – A Needle in a Haystack

By now, only the most ardent luddites can avoid being impressed by recent developments in artificial intelligence. Language models like ChatGPT and Claude have gotten good enough at drawing on their vast memory, and their deep pattern-recognition skills, that not only can they perform mundane secretarial tasks and summarize voluminous medical and legal case files, but they can also to serve as high-school and college tutors and research aids. A question like: “Given that black locust wood is extremely strong and rot-resistant, why isn’t it commonly used in aircraft construction?” can be answered within seconds with a high-quality essay that draws information from various corners of the training corpus and assembles it into a coherent whole….

To finish reading my essay, just head on over to Contemplations on the Tree of Woe. And if you like it, consider looking at the other fine posts that are on the substack (I’m not even the only guest author) and then subscribe to that site as well, so that you don’t miss the next great piece.

Since I am not a full time political commentator (I still have to work with my hands during the daytime) I wasn’t able to react to JD Vance’s recent remarks in Munich as quickly as I would have liked. Even so, what the new Vice President said there on 14 February is worth paying attention to. And for someone who usually fills his website with predictions of a gloomy future, it is quite nice to be able to write something upbeat and optimistic for a change.

The Munich Security Conference has been held annually since 1963, and is a place for senior government officials from a variety of (mostly European) countries to discuss their military and foreign policies. Probably the most significant year for the conference was 2007, when Vladimir Putin came and spoke about how Russia was being disrespected, how it would never accept a subordinate role in the unipolar order that the United States was trying to lead, and how expanding NATO eastward was a serious mistake.

The ability to listen to someone, and think hard about what the world looks like from his point of view – even if that person’s moral vision is very different from your own – is one of the marks of a mature mind. But it’s not something that the America-led bloc came anywhere close to doing. Instead, we got 15 more years of acting like the world has room for just one hegemon (or one and a half if you count China, toward which the US and its allies are much more accommodating). At the same time, no European countries made a serious attempt to build up their militaries to the point of parity with Russia’s – or even to the point of being able to act independently of the United States.

Vladimir Putin then saw that situation – he saw a bunch of weak European countries, overflowing with a sense of moral superiority but with small militaries incapable of autonomous action, while the one NATO country that was definitely strong enough to act was far away and had little direct interest in the fate of eastern Europe. And Putin called NATO’s bluff, and invaded Ukraine. And now, even though the war has gone on for three years, Ukraine is still fighting alone and (being outnumbered four to one) has little chance of winning.

I was writing about all of this well before JD Vance became Vice President and a got a chance to address the Munich conference himself (you can read his full speech here). Vance is one of the handful of Americans who not only understands the situation but is forthright enough to talk about what he sees. And indeed Vance’s previous comments about the futility of American involvement in Ukraine, and the need to deal with freeloading by the smaller NATO countries, made me suspect that he would agree with my reading of the strategic situation, which I have written about many times.

For instance, in this article from 2022, and this one from 2023, I faulted the West for failing to have a “theory of mind” for Russians, though I also faulted Russia for its corruption, brutality, and lack of a positive moral vision beyond anger toward the West. And my longest essay on foreign affairs is called “The Poland Paradox: How Faraway Allies Make Small Countries Less Safe.” The gist of it is that, by neglecting their own militaries and outsourcing their defense to a faraway ally whose commitment to fight, if push came to shove, was questionable, the nations of Europe doomed themselves to a disaster that never would have happened if countries like Poland, Hungary, and their neighbors had stepped into the power vacuum and rebuilt their militaries the way Russia did. (There is a similar situation in East Asia – the combined naval and air forces of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam are more than enough to contain Chinese power if they build local alliances and stop relying so heavily on the Americans, though at the moment there is no political will to make this happen.)

But America’s new Vice President chose not to make weapons, strategy, or military alliances the topic of his speech at Munich. As he explained near the beginning:

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense – the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values….

Last December, I wrote the Romanian Constitutional Court’s cancellation of that country’s elections in an article called “Romania and the Iranization of the West.” My thesis was that the sort of managed democracy that Europe’s technocrats are setting up – one where the people are allowed to vote as a sort of ceremonial ritual, but where election outcomes are carefully prevented from influencing any issue on which the non-democratic arm of the government has a strong opinion – is the kind of government that Iran has. (Iranians get to vote in multiparty elections every four years, but elected officials, including the president, are figureheads who can’t say or do anything of which the Supreme Leader or Guardian Council disapprove.)

Vance was too polite to use the Iran analogy. But he was quite blunt in saying that Europe can’t claim to care about “democratic values” if Romania’s top court can get praises from all over the continent by cancelling a presidential election on the grounds of “Russian influence” even though (1) Romania’s written laws and constitution don’t give the court this power, (2) there was no actual vote fraud, just alleged dark-money ad-buying of the sort that occurs to some extent in every election, and (3) the simultaneous parliamentary election was not cancelled or annulled, due to its having been won by a coalition of center and left-wing parties.

Vance was equally contemptuous toward the ambition, held by numerous German statesmen, of banning Alternative für Deutschland. (This is a party which is constantly being compared to the Nazis, even though its most “radical” policy is its desire to reverse the mass migration that has made Germany a much more dangerous place to live over the last ten or eleven years.)

When we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.

Vance followed this up with a full-throated defense of free speech, telling the Europeans that, as much as they might think of themselves as the winners of the Cold War, so long as people in the “democratic” part of Europe can be arrested for burning the Quran, or posting rude things on social media, or even just for silent prayer on a public street – and if the ruling parties of present-day Europe feel more threatened by the recent decensoring of Twitter/X than by any of this – then the West’s victory in the Cold War was hollow.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential – and trust me, I say this with all humour – if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

Vance was also candid about his own country’s failures to live up to some of these ideals in the recent past:

In the interests of comity, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.... [But] in Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square.

There was little clapping during the Vance speech, and after it was over, a lot of prominent Europeans reacted very rudely to it. For instance, on Saturday the British newspaper The Guardian published a headline which read: “JD Vance’s Munich Speech Laid Bare the Collapse of the Transatlantic Alliance.” It was subtitled: “The US vice-president was hypocritical and insensitive, but bracingly clear in his resetting of relationships.”

German Chancellor Olaf Shulz was even blunter; he reacted to Vance by telling the conference: “That is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies. We firmly reject that.”

Just how a country like Germany – which only exists as a unified entity because of the American victory in the Cold War, whose military expenditure is one fourteenth of the United States’, and whose economy never recovered from the double-blow of covid and the loss of cheap Russian gas – is supposed to “firmly reject” what JD Vance said remains a mystery. Likewise, the fact that so many Europeans are willing to accept the end of their alliance with the United States, rather than reconsidering their hatred of free speech, bodes poorly for the future.

Europe is going to have a tough row to hoe over the next few decades. Americans have grown increasingly tired of the smaller NATO countries’ freeloading. And while Europe’s leaders are full of indignation about what Russia is doing (but not over the bigger threat posed by Middle Eastern migrants, some of whose crimes JD Vance described in detail) these people haven’t shown the courage or foresight to do much about either threat.

Too many European elites see “democracy” in much the same way that America’s Democratic Party does – i.e. as something other than a system of government in which the voters are in charge, and where they sometimes do things that the elites disapprove of. To the Eurocrats, real democracy is a mere stepping stone – two steps above the conservative Christian monarchies that began collapsing in 1917, one step above the communist governments that fell in 1989, and one step below the Soros/Schwab-style technocratic society that they are trying to build – a society built on the principle of “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.”

JD Vance, for the sake of politeness, chose to finish his speech with an offer of continued friendship to Europeans who still care about the old values. But at the end of the day, there is a kernel of truth to the left’s claim that the speech was mostly aimed at Vance’s domestic base. After all, JD Vance is an American; he only has authority in the United States; and if Europe is to be turned around, it will take a lot more European courage and European leadership than Europe appears to have at the moment.

The quiet reaction to Romania’s cancelled election back in December bodes poorly. After all, when communism fell in 1989, it fell because millions of protestors were willing to react to government abuses by dragging furniture into the streets to make barricades, knowing full well that they might end up getting shot (as had happened a generation earlier in Budapest in 1956, and Prague in 1968.) The fact that, 35 years into the “liberal” era, Romania’s top court was able to cancel a presidential election without provoking similar unrest isn’t just an outrage, it’s an embarrassment. And the ordinary Romanians who let it happen aren’t just victims, they’re cowards.

At the moment, Romania has rescheduled its elections for May of this year. But nobody knows if the authorities intend to let all of the parties get a fair chance to compete, or if, in the event that another right-wing victory seems likely, they’ll disqualify one or more candidates on specious grounds.

And watching Europeans submit to autocracy in such a supine way makes it hard for people on the other side of the ocean to care whether or not the autocrats they submit to happen to live in Moscow. As Vance said during his speech:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

What are you defending yourselves for?

That is a question that Europeans are going to have to think about long and hard in the coming years. JD Vance, as an outsider, can’t answer it for them. But he can make it clear that not every answer to that question is equally worthy of the American people’s respect – or of their continued military support.

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.

In the flurry of news items coming out of this week’s presidential inauguration, one of them stands out for its uniqueness: JD Vance’s complaint, a few days before being sworn in as vice president, that he would have preferred to be spending the evening of 20 January at the Ohio States vs. Notre Dame title game.

Fortunately for Vance, a proud Buckeye alum, Ohio State won. (Unfortunately for my own Indiana family, Notre Dame lost.)

Television executives were disappointed, though – the game had the third fewest viewers out of the last eleven college championships. This is of course unsurprising when the 12-team playoff format – a massive expansion over the 4-team system that existed until last year – has pushed the title game so late into January that, not only did it conflict with the inauguration, but the NFL playoffs (which in the past have always started after the college champion is decided) were mostly over by then as well. In short, it’s possible for people to get tired of watching football, and this year, most of us did.

The season finale wasn’t the only part of college football that suffered. The conference championships, played in the first week of December, are practically a non-event under the new rules. I remember last year how excited most fans were about those games, since back then they were make-or-break events – winning its conference didn’t guarantee that a team would advance, but teams who didn’t win weren’t going anywhere.

But this time, three out of four Power-4 championships sent both the winner and the loser to the playoffs. Even more bizarrely, the eventual national champion, the Ohio Buckeyes, made the playoffs without even playing in the Big Ten championship. And to add to the commotion, the one team that began the playoffs undefeated – the Oregon Ducks – were eliminated after a second-round loss to the Buckeyes, who had already lost a game to Oregon in Week 7, before losing again to Michigan in Week 14.

In short, college football used to be a sport where every game mattered, and playing for a national title was the reward that a team earned by playing very, very well all season long. (Out of the ten champions between 2014 and 2023, five had perfect seasons and the other five had only one loss each.) Now, there are hardly any make-or-break moments until the playoffs themselves, when a lucky four weeks just might outweigh a lackluster season up to that point.

The question of how we came to this point has both a simple answer, and a complicated one.

The simple answer is that expanding the playoff to twelve teams was a gross overcorrection to a genuine problem – under the old rules, a team might go undefeated in a good conference (as the Florida State Seminoles did in the ACC in 2023) only to get passed over by the ranking committee in favor of one-loss teams with slightly stronger schedules (the Texas Longhorns and Alabama Crimson Tide.) Letting the Seminoles get left out like this was indeed an embarrassment for college football. Even so, there were plenty of less radical ways to fix the problem – the ranking system could have been rebalanced to give more weight to perfect seasons, or the playoffs could have been expanded to six teams rather than twelve.

So it’s clear that there had to be other motivations, and that’s where I think politics comes in – not electoral politics, obviously, but the same baleful centralizing trend that we’ve seen at work in so much of public life. National institutions are swallowing local ones, and the people in charge of these institutions (or at least the athletic ones) are increasingly concerned with money and spectacle rather than good old-fashioned sportsmanship.

For most of its history, college football in America has been a very local affair. Boys aspired to play for a school that they grew up near, or that their relatives had attended or played for. Local rivalries mattered more than just about anything else – almost every Auburn or Berkeley player cared more about winning the Iron Bowl or taking home the Stanford Axe than he did about how his team ranked in the AP or Coaches’ Poll. Nor were most people even bothered by the fact that those polls often disagreed about which team was best, or that other “selectors” (famously Richard Nixon in 1969) also tried their hands at declaring a champion.

The fact that bowl-bound teams had a half-and-half chance of winning their bowl game and finishing the season on a high note was also a plus; playoffs, after all, are bound to end depressingly for all the teams but one. And also, even after a unified national championship game was established, the fact that there was only one such game – and that one or at most two regular season losses ended a team’s chances of getting to play in it – kept most fans focused on local rivalries.

Like so much of American life, college football was just better when it was less touched by the firm hand of centralization – before twenty or so teams with national TV fanbases and lots of money to pay their best players got to run roughshod over the smaller schools, schools that have to get by with youths who go there because of family or geography, or even (imagine this) because they aspire to get a certain kind of education.

Obviously, college football didn’t decay in isolation. The same centralizing, spectacle-seeking ethos was also behind the nationwide trend of putting lots of resources into elite student athletics while letting physical education for ordinary K12 students slacken or even disappear – a trend which has clearly done much more to harm the typical American child than any changes in how NCAA championships are awarded.

There are people who like to complain that modern Americans care too much about sports; they often say that if ordinary Americans weren’t so distracted by “bread and circuses,” then we wouldn’t be so morally depraved or politically impotent. This is a claim that I mostly disagree with.

It is indeed possible to overindulge in spectator sports. But if you look at the big picture of American history, you’ll see that a century ago our ancestors were just as enamored of Babe Ruth and Knute Rockne as our generation is of LeBron James and Matthew Stafford. And the Americans of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were not soft or lazy.

Neither, for that matter, were the Classical Greeks, who saved western civilization at Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis and Platea, who invented theatre and philosophy, and who discovered that the Earth is round… at the same time that they were constantly getting passionate about athletic contests.

And yet, there is a big difference between an Athenian youth of the fifth century BC, stripping down to run or wrestle in the Olympics with the expectation that, win or lose, he will return to his city and continue his education in rhetoric and law and philosophy and military tactics… versus a Roman slave-gladiator throwing spears at a tiger, or knifing another slave to death in the Coliseum in front of a roaring audience of fifty thousand Plebs.

The Greek is competing at Olympia to honor his parents and his city; he is driven by pride of place, and the athletic games are part of a broader educational program that prepares him for citizenship. The Roman gladiator has no connection to any particular place, the crowd has no real loyalty to him and is just there to be entertained, and the only future the man is preparing for – on the off chance that he isn’t killed sooner or later – is that he’ll win enough times to be freed and get rich.

Fortunately, American athletics have not yet sunk to the level of blood sport. But in most other ways we’ve been moving toward the decadent, late-Roman bread-and-circuses model, and away from the Greek focus on education and virtue and love of one’s hometown.

Sports are important to the American way of life. And when we let them get too centralized, or let them devolve into a pure money-chasing spectacle, America suffers. Whether it’s neglecting P.E. for ordinary students because we’re only concerned about elite athletes who draw a crowd, or letting second-rate teams win the national football title because eleven playoff games make for good television – either way, we aren’t being true to our heritage.

There are Americans who want to get rid of most or all athletic scholarships in an attempt to make American universities more “meritocratic.” (Some of these people, like Vivek Ramaswamy, even pass themselves off as conservatives). I hope that they never prevail.

Doing well at a sport is a sign of good character – it is a sign that a young man or woman is driven, disciplined, and (for some sports and positions) a quick thinker and a natural leader as well. And while the kind of intelligence that standardized tests measure is also important, it is only a narrow kind of intelligence, and not nearly as all-encompassing as the faux meritocrats make it out to be.

These people, if they got their way, would make our country more like South Korea – a place where life for young people is a miserable grind, with teenagers often spending fifteen hours a day at school and test prep as they compete for limited seats in a narrow circle of prestigious universities – and at the end of it all their country has wound up with a fertility rate of about 0.8. (China, Taiwan, and Singapore are almost as bad, but for reasons I don’t fully understand the Koreans have it worst.)

We Americans need to do everything in our power to avoid this fate – whether that means keeping athletic scholarships in place, or making physical fitness count in high school GPA, or raising the status of trade schools relative to four-year colleges, or simply not giving the Ivy League schools (whose academic standards are often lousy anyway) so much unearned prestige relative to other universities.

At the end of the day, I would be very happy to live in a country that pursues balance and moderation in these things. A country where teachers can look at a skilled high school mathematician or debate team captain and see a youth whose education won’t be complete until he can run a 5 ½ minute mile, and has lifted enough weights to build a handsome figure. And where a top football talent might choose to play at a small university rather than a large one because he admires the small school’s academics, or because his father played there.

And I would also be happy to see an end to the twelve-team college football playoff. Because it is absurd.

It is absurd for the title game to be played after most fans have already lost interest due to being halfway through the NFL post-season. It is absurd for most of the conference championship games to send both the winning team and the losing team to the playoffs. And it is absurd for the only undefeated team in the regular season to have to play against – and possibly lose to – a two-loss team that it has already beaten once.

Were I put in charge of the whole system, I would probably revive the old Bowl Championship Series – where the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, and Orange Bowl took turns as the Championship Bowl – albeit with a few modifications. To make sure that any undefeated team that’s not in a minor conference gets a chance to play for the title, I would (1) reweight the ranking system so that undefeated teams are always at the top unless they played a very weak schedule, and (2) solve the occasional problem of a season with three undefeated teams by holding an ad-hoc playoff game between the #2 and #3 seeds a week or two before the title game.

But that is probably too much to wish for. As it is, I would be content if the people in charge of the College Football Playoff had the good sense to step back from the brink and do next year’s tournament with six or eight teams.

After all, I am at a school with a top tier football program, and if, sometime after I graduate, I get elected vice president – and if, in that same year, my alma mater is playing in the season finale – and if 20 January happens to fall on a Monday – then for goodness sake, I don’t want to have to choose, like J.D. Vance did, between the title game and my own inauguration!

This article was originally written for the American Thinker.

Most Americans and Europeans are well aware that they belong to a culture that has long been shaped by its love of science and engineering. But ask them what era in our history that technological impulse can be traced too, and I suppose that most would either say that it began with the ancient Greeks, or else during the Renaissance and the “Scientific Revolution” around the year 1500.

Few think of the Christian Middle Ages as a time of great innovations, a time when mathematics, science, and especially engineering came to matter in daily life to a degree that would have stunned the ancients. And this ignorance, on the part of most people now living, is a crying shame.

I trust that most of my readers, even if they have not read Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, are at least familiar with the basic premise of this greatest work of Middle English poetry. The Knight’s Tale is followed by the Miller’s Tale, then the Reeve’s Tale, then the Cook’s Tale, and so forth, as twenty-four pilgrims tell stories to entertain one another on their way to venerate the martyred St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.

While Chaucer gives some of his characters personal names (i.e. Robin the Miller), they’re mainly known to us by their occupations, and they identify themselves that way, too. So, for instance, when Robin the Miller tells a derogatory (and very lewd!) story about a carpenter, the Reeve (who had been a carpenter as a young man) feels honor-bound to tell a derogatory story about a miller.

Of course, nothing about this strikes 21^st century Americans as unusual – we too are a society where our occupations (which we usually arrived at by personal choice) are the most basic way we identify ourselves. It takes a fair bit of historical perspective to realize how rare this is – how few premodern societies, apart from medieval Western Europe, did this. (For instance, in the New Testament St. Paul introduces himself as a Jew from the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, a native of Tarsus, and a student of the rabbi Gamaliel; it is almost by chance that we learn that he was also a tentmaker, when he briefly takes up his old trade with Aquila and Priscilla in Corinth.)

Of course, the high degree to which medieval Christians identified with their trades was not something that happened in isolation. It came hand-in-hand with the high status which their society granted to its increasingly numerous middle classes, and also the inventiveness with which millers, carpenters, shipwrights, masons, accountants, and other skilled workers were continually improving their various crafts.

There are two books on this subject which I have recently read, and which I can enthusiastically recommend to people with some spare reading time and a desire to really understand and appreciate our medieval scientific heritage.

Frances and Joseph Gies’ 1994 book Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages is a thorough, if rather dry, account of the many inventions that reshaped Europe between the fall of Rome and the 15^th century Renaissance, and which turned Europe from a backwater that could only envy Arabic and Chinese engineering into a continent on the edge of world domination.

Seb Falk’s 2020 book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science gives a panoramic tour of 14^th century mathematics, science, astronomy, and education as it would have looked from the point-of-view of one man – an English Benedictine Monk named John of Westwyk, whose most famous work was a set of instructions on how to make and use the Equatorie of the Planetis – a sort of mechanical computer for doing Ptolemaic astronomy. While Falk’s book is more narrowly focused than that of Gies, it is also more pleasurable to read. (Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel is the sort of book that’s more likely to show up on a college syllabus, though someone as interested in technology and history as I am would almost certainly enjoy both of them.)

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel is divided into seven chapters, and tells a roughly chronological story of European engineering between the fall of Rome, c. AD 500, and the end of the Middle Ages a thousand years later. A typical chapter might have a few pages each devoted to ploughing, waterpower, weaving, dying, carpentry, glasswork, Gothic architecture, military engineering (castles, trebuchets, etc.), road and bridge building, navigation, naval architecture, and bookmaking.

The myth of the Middle Ages as a time of stasis, where curiosity dwindled and hardly anything was done to improve on Greek and Roman science, is quickly dispelled. Although some technologies were lost at the very beginning of the period, most of them were recovered fairly quickly, and in a few areas – especially agriculture and weaponry – progress continued without the slightest interruption. Even before the year 1000, when written records were scarce and the population remained well below its Roman peak, new spinning and weaving methods, new animal harnesses, new kinds of ships, and the first water-powered mills had revolutionized life in Christian Europe.

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – with the Renaissance and its conscious attempts to revive Greek and Roman lore still a century away – devout master masons were adorning England, France, and the Low Countries with their highly innovative Gothic cathedrals, marvels of architecture far in advance of anything the Romans ever had. One of these, Lincoln Cathedral, was the tallest building in the world at its completion in 1311; it would not be surpassed until the Washington Monument was erected in 1884.

Tracing the evolution of new technologies is no easy task for a historian, and it is often a great mystery whether a particular invention – the padded horse collar, for instance, or the blast furnace, or the magnetic compass – arose independently or was brought from Asia.

For evidence of which technologies were known in a certain country in a certain century, scholars often turn to the beautiful illuminated Bibles into which medieval scribes put so much labor. There, illustrations of the ancients hard at work building Noah’s Ark or the Tower of Babel would reveal how carpentry or masonry was done in the illustrator’s century – the irony being that it was those men’s lack of interest in historical accuracy that gives us our best window into the past.

One memorable scene in the 9^th-century Utrecht Psalter illustrates some verses from the 63^rd Psalm: “But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes….” The wicked (“those that seek my soul”) are preparing for battle by sharpening their swords the old-fashioned way, with hand-held whetstones, while the righteous use the new rotary grindstone, a machine unknown in earlier centuries.

To medieval men and women, hard work and innovation were spiritual callings. This was obviously so for the priests, monks, and nuns who almost alone kept literacy and mathematics alive, as well as for the architects who built the churches, the sculptors and glaziers who adorned them with “a Bible in glass and stone,” and men like the “Fréres Pontifes,” or Brothers of the Bridge, a small order of monks devoted to bridging the treacherous rivers of southern France in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, and who built (among other edifices) the famous Pont d’Avignon.

But it was also true for all of the craft guilds that made up that rapidly growing middle class in medieval Europe’s cities. They all had their patron saints, they all had their peculiar donations to the parish churches and the great cathedrals, they each had a mystery play to perform in the festivals at Christmas and Easter, and they all exhorted their members to remember that their curiosity was a gift of God, and that it was by Christ’s grace that they exercised their talents upon the elements.

And it was largely through the work of these guilds that many European countries –most especially Italy, England, and Holland – made the slow journey from being nations of serfs to nations of freemen.

The Church had already seen to it that, from the very beginning of the Middle Ages, the masses had far more rights than the Roman slaves from whom they were often descended. A serf was bound to work his master’s land, but he could own property in his own right as well, and he could not be sold, or even compelled to work on the sabbaths and the saints’ days that the Church had set aside for rest.

The lack of a cheap supply of movable chattel slaves drove medieval entrepreneurs to put much more effort into discovering labor-saving devices than their Roman forbears ever had. And as the cities with the skilled laborers became ever more important to the public good, kings and emperors began granting these bustling settlements new privileges – such as the right to elect their own mayors, or the “freedom of the city” whereby any serf who escaped to a city and managed to live there for a year and a day was a free man, entitled to pursue whatever occupation he liked without fear of being returned to his master.

It was then only a matter of time until characters like Chaucer’s Miller and Reeve and Franklin and Merchant, upwardly-mobile citizens proud of their various professions, began filling the pages of medieval literature.

When one is aware of all this history, it will seem baffling that the myth of a stagnant Middle Ages still holds sway over so many minds. Its persistence can really only be understood by remembering the anti-clericalism that gave rise to it: basically, a lot of 18^th century intellectuals – the same sorts of people whose theories produced the French Revolution – couldn’t give the Catholic Church credit for fostering so much learning and social progress.

Also, one must consider the modern left’s general mixture of ignorance and disrespect for the cultural heritage of white Europeans, plus its hatred of capitalism. For it was the wish “to serve God and his Majesty… and to grow rich as all men desire to do,” as the conquistador Bernal Díaz so memorably put it, that had turned peasants into townsmen, and townsmen into inventors and engineers, and eventually sent the most ambitious of them to make their fortunes in the New World.

Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel takes the big picture view, with individuals rarely showing up long enough for me to remember their names. But Seb Falk’s book The Light Ages is its opposite in two ways. In addition to focusing on a single historical person (the English monk John of Westwyk) and his times, it is also more concerned with philosophy and pure science than with engineering.

We follow John from his boyhood in the village of St. Albans into the Benedictine monastery of St. Albans, which stood on a nearby hill. (At this time, the monastery owned the land the village was on and functioned as its feudal lord.) At around age ten, children like John who were considering becoming monks would begin learning monastic discipline, and they also learned how to read, write, and use numbers.

As we read Falk’s book, we too learn how to multiply and divide Roman numerals, and we too learn the basics of the medieval calendar, with its feasts and holy days, and its specific prayers and psalms for each hour which made timekeeping – and hence astronomy – so important to the monks.

Curiously, it was in this book that I learned, for the first time, why the days of the week come in the order that they do. Just about everyone knows that, in most European languages, they’re named after the planets, but why is their order Sun-Moon-Mars-Mercury-Jupiter-Venus-Saturn?

The answer, as it turns out, is astrological. To a traditional astrologer, not only the days, but also the hours of the days, have planetary rulerships: the first hour of Sunday is ruled by the sun, the second hour by the next planet inward, Venus, the third by Mercury, then the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun again (the classical order having the Sun rather than the Earth between Venus and Mars). Since the twenty-fourth hour of Sunday is ruled by Mercury, the first hour of the next day goes to the Moon, hence the name Monday, and so the cycle continues until Saturday is again followed by Sunday.

As we follow John of Westwyk through the pages of The Light Ages, we see more and more sides to medieval scientific life. The young Westwyk would have learned how to copy books in St. Albans’ scriptorium, where not only Christian writings but also those of many Pagan and Islamic philosophers were held in highest regard. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a prolific Persian scholar of the 9^th century, produced writings that later became so fundamental to European mathematics that his name evolved into our word “algorithm.” The 10^th-11^th century Persian Ibn Sina (“Avicenna” in Latin) wrote the Canon of Medicine, a book second only to Galen’s work in its authority among medieval Christians. And in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Ibn Rushd, or “Averroes,” a 12^th-century Andalusian commentator on Aristotle, is given one of the most exalted places in limbo (as a Muslim, he can’t get into heaven, but he’s still in a paradise by earthly standards).

As a young monk, John of Westwyk goes to university, and we readers are treated to a long chapter about medieval universities. The early universities were essentially craft guilds or “corporations” for students and lecturers, where both had more academic freedom than was ever found in earlier societies; they also spread the philosophical and mathematical knowledge of antiquity over a much wider portion of society than had had access to it in Greek and Roman times. Later, in a chapter on astrology, Falk’s readers learn the basic spiritual attributes of the seven classical planets, as well as how to use an astrolabe to tell time and (more importantly) to figure out which planets and signs are about to rise at any hour of the day or night.

Medieval men and women are often ridiculed for falling prey to superstitions, but it’s important to remember that sciences like alchemy and astrology were not universally believed in. For instance, Chaucer devoted an entire Canterbury Tale, the Canon Yeoman’s Tale, to a long and detailed harangue about the creative ways that alchemists swindle the gullible. Thomas Aquinas argued in the Summa Theologica that, while Christians may believe in astrology, they are not required to do so. And in The Light Ages, Seb Falk tells the story of how, in 1437, the instrument-makers of Paris persuaded that city’s university to help them enact a law that required all physicians to own an astrolabe (for determining the best times for bloodletting and other treatments) whether they wished to or not.

Some of us may be tempted to scoff at these instrument-makers and their leader, the physician-turned-metalworker Jean Fusoris. But when you consider just how many people in our own day and age also make their livings by lobbying the government to force their fellow citizens to pay for useless or even harmful medical innovations, you’ll realize that the spirit of Jean Fusoris has never gone away.

Other chapters follow John of Westwyk as the middle-aged monk goes on crusade (unfortunately there are no records of how he performed in battle) and as he writes his masterpiece, the manual for the Equatorie of the Planetis. Astronomy back then involved doing math in base sixty – not just for degrees, arcminutes, and arcseconds, but all the way out to nine sexagesimal places! – with each ‘digit’ written out in Roman numerals. And while Westwyk and his contemporaries were mistaken in thinking that the planets went around the Earth, their observations were still careful enough to discover the cycle of apsidal precession that, for Saturn (the slowest planet) takes about forty-nine thousand years to complete a full revolution.

One cannot even scratch the surface of what has been written about medieval science and technology (and reading Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel and The Light Ages is just scratching the surface) without coming away with an immense degree of admiration for the thinkers and inventors of the Christian Middle Ages.

It is true that these men had their faults, mostly on the pure science side – the philosophers and the clergy were usually too keen to defend ancient authorities like Aristotle and Pliny when they should have been making observations for themselves. (The humbler carpenters and smiths and masons had no such luxury; for them the test of an invention was whether it worked.)

But it is equally obvious that nothing that happened during what we call the Renaissance or the Scientific Revolution would have been possible without centuries of lesser-known, but equally-vital, medieval progress. And that progress was made by thousands of hard-working smiths and masons, bookmakers and lecturers, philosophers and mathematicians and naturalists (and these latter usually clergy) who saw curiosity as a virtue, and who devoted their life’s labor to plumbing the mysteries of God’s creation.

A shorter version of this essay originally appeared at the American Thinker.