Trump’s expansionist fixation with both Canada and Greenland are completely and totally irrational and bizarre. It seems as if he thinks he’s some sort of long-ago dictator who can take over countries just for the helluva it. At this point, Trump appears more like a random street-thug who likes to threaten and bully people just for the hell of it. As he would say in another era, sad.
This iteration of the Trump administration has me shaking my head. I can support America deciding to slowly retire from being the global hegemon. If Europe wants to defend Ukraine to the last inch on principle, leave 'em to it. But the jokes about Canada (I'm pretty sure these are joke) are unseemly, and I can't tell what the heck he is on about with Greenland.
The worst thing though is sending Venezuelans gang members, sine trial, to a prison in El Salvador for a sentence of 'lemme think about it'. If that's just a way to pressure Venezuela to take them back, maybe it's work out, but this is still not how the US is supposed to handle things.
I’d say that the worse thing is the previous administration deciding to let the Venezuelan gangs come here and set up shop, thus condemning entire neighborhoods to long sentences of “let me think about it.”
They’re not citizens.
We gave up on due process with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay. We weren’t too fond of it during WW1 or 2 either.
'We gave up on due process with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay"
I want it back. There are good historical reasons for letting the judicial branch decide if you are a gang member rather than the cops. It's for your protection too.
It was dereliction of duty to not vet those people when they came in. The gamesmanship of their native countries refusing to take them back has left us holding the bag. I’d much rather dump them across the Mexican or Canadian border, but those countries have laws against illegal immigration.
As has been said before, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I’m not without misgivings, I just don’t consider illegal aliens to have the same rights as citizens.
You can't bring a classical liberal toy knife to a bolshevik gunfight. As has been pointed out, these people should never have been let in but the classical liberals refuse to believe that all men are not in fact created equal.
Canadians on X seem to be hysterical and paranoid. I keep telling them we don't admit states that aren't willing, unlike other empires. Matt Walsh said the labor camps will be very comfortable.
Those DamnYankee Puritans from East Anglia had a lot of Danish blood, so I'm not sure how good an ally Denmark was for the rest of the US.
Why have the Trump people transmogrified into aggressive interventionist-expansionists, seemingly overnight? As undisciplined, unprincipled, myopic bullies?
The Taki-Mag article doesn't address directly how this trend began. The suggestion is: (1.) that it flows from the pettiness and amateurism inherent to Trump the man; and (2.) that it is sustained by immature and sensationalistic, reality-detached people who pursue politics as a kind of video-game (played on Twitter and other such places).
We are forced to make a highly negative assessment of the entire Trump movement, both in theory and certainly now in practice (ie.g., calling for unilaterally annexing foreign territories and even countries; yielding to the temptation, as if it's nothing, to engage in interventionist bombings to support Israel; plotting with glee how to humiliate and undermine Europe).
The harsh reality: the Trump phenomenon is never what its more-principled supporters wanted it to be. The people who have attached themselves to the thing are often unprincipled, weak, opportunists who rode the coattails of an anti-intellectual demagogic movement and who now go along with it.
What part of "Sent to live in the Ontario Autonomous Oblast" as a punishment for our enemies doesn't sound good?
Otherwise, the good part of Canada is in the West. Alberta oil and gas; Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia farmland and forests. Accept these as states, and let Ottawa keep the rest.
It's telling that Trump didn't bring up his designs for Greenland, Canada, or Panama during the campaign. We didn't vote for this and he doesn't have a mandate for it. Tell Trump Jr he can run on this platform in 2028.
There is an "anti-Western" element to the Trump people. Steve Sailer touched on in the Taki-Mag article but doesn't examine it directly.
That MAGA would be "anti-Western" is ironic. After all, a vague notion of White-Western Revival was why so many core supporters of Trump went with him, against their better judgments in most cases (and why many have stuck around the Trump personality cult).
Vance (whose genetic legacy is half-Hindu) and Hegseth and others reveal their own anti-Western attitude and posture, in both public and private statements. They are highly keen on undermining Western Europe -- and giggling about it. The sense of Western Unity is discarded and mocked. White-Americans have more in common with White-Europeans than they do with Multicultural-Miscellaneous Americans, but in these people's minds it's not only the opposite, but White-Europeans are a hostile enemy.
_________
The extreme pettiness and stupidity of this Blumpf Greenland Grab gambit fits with the Trump people's nonseriousness, of course, -- and of how beholden they really are to a demagogic politics of "just say whatever sounds cool and make us look good, or can intimidate losers into yielding to our whims." But it also fits well with the anti-Western posture from these people.
These b.1970s, b.1980s Trump-II people's minds have been clouded and distorted by some negative influences of their time. The influence of political Zionism -- the Jewish Lobby and its activities on behalf of the Israeli hegemonic-drive in the Middle East -- is very clear. But I think it goes further: These Trump-II people think of the USA as a giant Israel.
In the Israel story, Europe is a obstruction or an enemy. I think to some extent these Trump-II people "buy" that idea. They have lost touch with reality; the reality, anyway, of what a Western Man should do in the world.
These Trump-II people do not think of the USA in the way everyone else has thought of it since the 17th century, as an extension of Western Civilization (primarily NW-European Protestant from the start; and still today shaped by those norms and with such a ethnocultural core).
A Trump government: a quasi-anti-Western Wokeness and aggressive Jewish ethnonationalism (Zionism) with a 'MAGA' cap on?
Vance does seem surprisingly anti-European. Is his thinking, influenced by Mrs Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, that European blood has stagnated and needs to be replenished by dynamic Hindu Aryans and Greenland’s Inuits?
"Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us." -- J. D. Vance, October 2016
Vance was then 32. By the early 2020s he had supposedly remade himself, if you believed the hype from some quarters, into some species of White-ethnonationalist, albeit an odd one who is friends with Mencius Moldbug, Horam Hazony (an Israeli financier highly interested in managing U.S. identity and politics), and other intellectual-cool-guy power-brokers. By 2022 and 2023, he is a little too willing to loudly declare he "doesn't care about Ukraine," and now this steady flow of anti-European comments from the man.
IMO, we have to ask a few basic questions about Vance: Who is he? What game is he playing? He met and married a Hindu-elite in 2013-14. Why? How, exactly, did he end up in an elite position, given that he comes, relatively speaking, out of nowhere? Something seems odd about it.
But to be specific about his political identity between about ages 25 to age 40 (2009 to 2025):
When was J.D. Vance "pretending"?
Was he pretending in the mid-late 2010s (anti-Trump, pro-Immigration, pro-Diversity)? Or is he pretending now, in the early-mid 2020s?
The most-charitable alternative is, "He changed his mind." Okay, but if something made him change his views on race-and-nation issues (the "nonwhite children" he has bragged of notwithstanding), what was it?
Do people really have such major ideological changes in their late thirties, as Vance was during his supposed epiphany? In other words, how many other b.1984 White men who, in 2016, were condemning racism would, within ca. five years, have been (supposedly) championing the other side? Isn't that more the kind of transformation typically seen between ages 15 and 20? Or 20 and 25? (Not 32 and ca. 37).
If we go with the "Vance changed his views" explanation, is it possible that he has never HAD stable political views? The allegation of "opportunism" is generally lazy, but maybe it's more like being a yes-man for cool-guy views he thinks are in, as also seen (e.g.) by his following many right-wing Twitter-troll accounts in/by the early 2020s.
Alas, we are back to: Who is J.D. Vance? There has been a lot of hype about this character, going back to the release of his book in 2016 and continuing up thru 2024. I don't have any good answers, except this one: He may not at all be what his fans (including the now-slavishly pro-Trump cheerleader Tucker Carlson) think he is.
The question I keep asking in Vance's case is: Radicalized from what to what?
And the other possibility is he didn't change his own views in the way most people do, but floated through the previous decade following perceived consensus all along. In other words, "normie" is probably best thought of as relative and not an absolute.
"One suggestion is by Likud being Israel’s party promoting anti-white racism within Israel. Likud is the party for everybody who resents both Arabs and Israel’s founding fathers, who were leftist secular European Jews, especially sophisticated German Ashkenazis.
What would be the American equivalent? It would be a party striving to unify everybody who resents post-Puritan northerners, to use the Albion’s Seed category. Call the bad guys “Mayflower descendants.” (Perhaps this is what Mencius Moldbug is up to?) Build a Bakersfield Coalition of rednecks, Latinos, and big owners."
The USA's is inflated by 20-25%: subtract the revenue from price gouging by oligopoly co's, omit all MIC revenue, & take out 20% of the healthcare sector which would not be necessary if people ate & exercised correctly. Dah dah! $22 Trillion
Adding in the countries above $500/capita in military spending in 2019, the list expands to:
9.) Brunei
10.) South Korea
11.) Bahrain
12.) Denmark
13.) France
14.) UK
15.) Finland
16.) Netherlands
17.) Luxembourg
18.) New Zealand
19.) Switzerland
20.) Canada
21.) Germany
22.) Sweden
23.) Greece
24.) Estonia. (Estonia should be included if rounding up to $500 for 2019; by 2025, Estonia is firmly in this club and has probably moved up a number of slots from above its 25th-place in 2019. Although small, Estonia seeks to be a bulwark-state for Germanic Western-Europe against Russia; and is highly paranoid of Russian designs on itself, not without historical reason.)
Failing to make the $500 cutoff in 2019: 25.) Russia, 26.) Italy, 27.) Portugal, 28.) Taiwan, 29.) Belgium, 30.) Lithuania, 40.) Japan, 41.) Latvia, 42.) Lebanon, 43.) Spain, 44.) Austria, 45.) Slovakia, 46.) Cyprus, 47.) Uruguay, 48.) Poland, 49.) Bulgaria, 50.) Slovenia.... and so on, with China at 67th place (
Russia's embarrassing failures in the Ukraine War of the past 38 months (early 2022 to mid-2025) were because of its own inherent economic weaknesses; it was not pacifism that led Russia to be unable, in the 2010s, to even maintain consistently a $500/capita military-spending level, falling below it in 2019. Even a $500/capita level would've only been one-fifth the USA's per-capita level (and the USA has 2.5x the population).
With both the first list ($1000/capita+ spenders) and the broader list ($500/capita spenders), you are looking mostly just at a proxy for how wealthy a given state is. The biggest single exception must be militaristic Israel.
Israel's long-term goal is clearly not only the elimination of the Palestinians as a pesky nuisance-population, but in becoming unquestioned regional hegemon and with major influence over the USA and Europe, giving them a serious degree of global power.
For Israel to achieve its goals it needs (1.) heavy spending of its own; (2.) subsidy and alliance-like ties to the USA; and therefore (3.) tight control over swathes of U.S. politics, which you've seen with Trump-I, Biden, and most especially Trump-II so far.
For most of his adult life, Donald Trump has been a real estate developer. Among the various things they do, developers deal in —-land.
He has also referenced the Guilded Age without irony as a high point in American history. He has praised the presidency of William McKinley. During his administration, McKinley gained Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines (as well as control over Cuba).
Perhaps Trump instinctively grasps that in order to be considered a great president in history, one has to acquire land.
To be honest, what does Denmark really need Greenland for anyway? They might as well give Greenland their independence, or hold a national vote on the matter. Whereas Greenland is near the Arctic Circle and not very far away from Russia. So National Security could help frame the debate.
Also one piece of land that is quite relevant to national security that Steve omitted from his article is Trump’s desire to re-acquire the Panama Canal. The US built the Canal in 1904 and controlled it until it was given to Panama in the late ‘70’s. Better the US to control the Canal again as opposed to China, which would be in violation of the Monroe Doctrine.
Yep, acquiring land definitely will place a president in the history books as a true leader as well as a success. Perhaps it really would take a former developer, one who has worked in acquiring buildings land and developing them to find a way to successfully make this happen.
What your analysis misses is that all of Western Europe has been 100% pro-US since 1945 (and elements of Western Europe were going that direction some decades earlier already).
Not just Greenland, but Denmark itself, and all of the core NATO bloc, are were already in a tight geopolitical bloc-relationship with the USA. 100% cooperation and common cause, a more-friendly relationship hardly possible. There is no need, for security, for this Greenland Grab gambit. OTOH, it considerably undermines U.S. prestige and honor, and is almost scripted as if to be from a movie villain.
The USA under DJT and these amateurish people, we really does look like the villain. What damage may be done before this is all over, God help us.
There is a need for security vs say…Russia, as Russia isn’t so far away from Greenland.
Also the point remains: just as national security should dictate our interests in acquiring Greenland, so too should national security interests dictate our interests in re-acquiring the Panama Canal, to prevent say, China from either acquiring it or at the very least attempt to gain control over it. As far as US realpolitik is concerned, The Monroe Doctrine must be maintained.
With any luck, they'll accidentally invite Frederiksen on a WhatsApp (or was it AOL Instant Messenger?) chat about plans to invade Greenland, giving her ample time to head it off at the pass.
If Blumpf ordered an armed seizure of the place, would any of these second-rate yes-men resign? Instead of participating in such a highly stupid invasion of Greenland (an ally), attempt to block the self-defeating malevolent stupidity and, if impossible, resigning out of principle.
Republicans have long resisted the very sensible arguments for admitting DC and Puerto Rico as full states. This is because they are afraid that they would be Democrat strongholds.
Would they take the risk of giving 55,000-population Greenland two senators?!
If you were a Greenlander could you accept anything more? You and what army? The US could literally just pay all 55,000 citizens $1,000,000 to vote for statehood.
Well I mean it's a valid fear, n'est-ce pas? I remember when I was very young being very sad that DC refused to vote for Ronald Reagan and I asked my father why they wouldn't when he lived there. My father, who wasn't racist per se, told me point blank that n-people don't vote Republican
A Greenlandic patriot, Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen, has produced a new MAGA cap as he and others try to rally unity and resistance against Blumpfian imperialism:
The cap, in red with white font, copies the design Blumpf made famous. It says “Make America Go Away.” The main symbol of the Greenlandic flag appears on the side.
The creator and promoter of the cap, Mr. Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen, has plenty of White-European ancestry combined with substantial Inuit-Eskimo ancestry via his mother. That assessment is after a review of his public Facebook page, which is where he first introduced the cap and started gaining what has been, be Greenlandic standards, major attention.
Also of interest on this unlikely Greenlandic hero of the hour: Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen is involved with the Greenlandic trading company KNI A/S, where he is a “maneger.” KNI A/S is “the successor to the Royal Greenland Trading Department, which controlled the government of Greenland itself from 1774 to 1908 and possessed a monopoly on Greenlandic trade from 1776 to 1950. Today, the company remains a major component of the Greenlandic economy and remains fully owned by the local government.”
The history of this company, now called KNI A/S, is testament to Greenland’s long centuries as a protectorate of Denmark. Blumpf blunders in and says “Hey, there’s no reason they should have ties to Greenland; I wanna grab it, get lost.; no time for talk; have my people get on a messaging app to coordinate out campaign to undermine these Greenlandic bozos, and prepare slots in that El Salvador mega-prison for Greenlandic dissidents and resisters. And Canada, you’re next.”
___________
Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen posted a message, in the Inuit language and Danish, accompanying his “Make America Go Away” cap. The Danish version auto-translates as:
Opfordring til borgere: Vances kones besøge er en charmeoffensiv. Hvis I tager et smilende selfie med dem, sender I et signal til hele verden om, at I elsker USA og ønsker at være en del af det. Lad derfor være med at vise interesse. Vi har allerede vist vores holdning gennem en stor demonstration. Lad os stå fast og holde sammen.
The original was posted on the weekend of March 22-23. That was after the White House announced the Hindu-brahmin-elite wife of the USA’s anti-European vice president would make a leisurely tour of scenic Greenland. The main stop being to observe the famous dogsled races (probably along with a contingent of security officials). That particular part of the USA’s latest pressure campaign has now reportedly been altered. But the "Make America Go Away" Greenlandic MAGA cap remains.
As the US devolves into violent sectarianism I personally welcome any additions to Team Red State.
Europe and Canada are moving from allies to Third World chaos agents. The US is becoming white people's last stand, the other Five Eyes countries having made clear their ultimate goal is the disenfranchisement and dismantling of their current white majorities.
What good can come of Canada being ruled by Han and Hindu cartels and continuing to import millions of Muslim Arabs and Africans? Same for Europe.
As our former allies are literally transforming themselves into Global South countries, we grab Alberta, Saskatchewan, Greenland, and the Canal Zone and prepare to defend ourselves.
It occurs to me that Israel is pursuing this strategy in its neighborhood, pushing into Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, and holding Hezbollah under threat of extinction. Putin is doing the same thing in Ukraine, which the Atlanticists regard as the tip of the spear against the Tsar and his anti-Pride Parade minions.
Absorbing the entirety of Canada and giving them full voting rights in the U.S. system would tilt the USA's electoral politics decidedly to the Left, as Sailer writes.
Trump has not proposed picking off parts of western Canada.
Nor has he said anything about protecting White-Western people's interests. His own team of yes-men displays a degree of Third Worldism of their own, and is plenty heavy on bringing in foreign elites.
I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It would be lovely to have a white nation-state republic debating marginal tax rates until the end of time but that bridge was crossed long ago.
An interesting fact about Scandinavian-colony Greenland vs quasi-US-colony Liberia:
Greenland is said to have 57,000 residents; Liberia is said to have 5,500,000. Greenland's total GDP and Liberia's total GDP are, however, about the same (both +/- $4 billion, nominal).
In per-capita nominal GDP, Greenland may be about 75x richer than Liberia. Danish-colony Greenland has done very well. Liberia, founded by ex-US slaves, has done very NOT well. Liberia has done even more poorly, generally speaking, than the norm in West Africa.
I think it’s time to admit that we’ve elected an old guy who, at his best, was sometimes successful primarily for his boundless chutzpah, not his brains or his character.
Greenland might have some Arctic trade-route or missile warning angle, but if so, why can’t anyone advance the argument. Trump certainly can’t. Vance could, but hasn’t, so I’m left to assume it’s just another random old-guy rambling that he hasn’t yet forgotten.
Steve Sailer's decision to conspicuously decline to endorse Trump in the 2015-16 cycle, 2020, or 2024 looks like a better call with every passing week.
Idea: --- I'd love to read a ranked list of your "best to worst presidents," of those you've seen, i.e., from your living memory and along Sailerian "my vague impression" lines. Not endorsing candidates but evaluating past presidents/administrations (and possibly the current one, so far, its many trainwrecks being more smoke than fire, so far...)
"The main internationally recognized exception was India adding some territories, such as the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1962 and formerly independent Sikkim in 1975."
Fun Sikkim fact(?): for a few summers in the 1970s my family would go to White Grass Ranch in Jackson Hole for a week on the way to visit my grandparents in Colorado, and at this dude ranch there was an alcoholic-seeming older man called Cookey, who ran rafting trips on the Snake River etc. My mother told me that this guy was the father of Hope Cooke, the last queen of Sikkim or whatever the title was. When she told me about it I found the whole idea impossibly glamorous, but my mother wasn't a fabulist, and it's highly possible that it was actually true...
Anyway, apparently Hope Cooke is still with us as I just learned from Wikipedia, where her entry is well worth a look. Among other things turns out she was married for a while in the 1980s to Mike Wallace–the historian of New York and author of Gotham, not the other one. I sat next to him at a dinner party in NYC twenty-some years ago: a very pleasant and unsurprisingly interesting guy. I wish I'd known about the Hope Cooke business then so I could have asked him about Cookey.
Trump’s expansionist fixation with both Canada and Greenland are completely and totally irrational and bizarre. It seems as if he thinks he’s some sort of long-ago dictator who can take over countries just for the helluva it. At this point, Trump appears more like a random street-thug who likes to threaten and bully people just for the hell of it. As he would say in another era, sad.
This iteration of the Trump administration has me shaking my head. I can support America deciding to slowly retire from being the global hegemon. If Europe wants to defend Ukraine to the last inch on principle, leave 'em to it. But the jokes about Canada (I'm pretty sure these are joke) are unseemly, and I can't tell what the heck he is on about with Greenland.
The worst thing though is sending Venezuelans gang members, sine trial, to a prison in El Salvador for a sentence of 'lemme think about it'. If that's just a way to pressure Venezuela to take them back, maybe it's work out, but this is still not how the US is supposed to handle things.
Trump-II: D-party "out"; Dishonor and Disgrace "in."
I'd just shoot them at the border, which is what I predict people will eventually be doing, long after Trump.
I’d say that the worse thing is the previous administration deciding to let the Venezuelan gangs come here and set up shop, thus condemning entire neighborhoods to long sentences of “let me think about it.”
They’re not citizens.
We gave up on due process with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay. We weren’t too fond of it during WW1 or 2 either.
'We gave up on due process with the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay"
I want it back. There are good historical reasons for letting the judicial branch decide if you are a gang member rather than the cops. It's for your protection too.
It was dereliction of duty to not vet those people when they came in. The gamesmanship of their native countries refusing to take them back has left us holding the bag. I’d much rather dump them across the Mexican or Canadian border, but those countries have laws against illegal immigration.
Two wrongs don't make a right, though I concede the way in which the left wrongs tends to act like a ratchet.
If this El Salvador prison thing turns out to be just a way to pressure Venezuela to take their garbage back, I will forgive it.
As has been said before, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. I’m not without misgivings, I just don’t consider illegal aliens to have the same rights as citizens.
You can't bring a classical liberal toy knife to a bolshevik gunfight. As has been pointed out, these people should never have been let in but the classical liberals refuse to believe that all men are not in fact created equal.
You lack vision.
Canadians on X seem to be hysterical and paranoid. I keep telling them we don't admit states that aren't willing, unlike other empires. Matt Walsh said the labor camps will be very comfortable.
Those DamnYankee Puritans from East Anglia had a lot of Danish blood, so I'm not sure how good an ally Denmark was for the rest of the US.
I would think that the Canucks should be flattered that anyone has any interest.
Why have the Trump people transmogrified into aggressive interventionist-expansionists, seemingly overnight? As undisciplined, unprincipled, myopic bullies?
The Taki-Mag article doesn't address directly how this trend began. The suggestion is: (1.) that it flows from the pettiness and amateurism inherent to Trump the man; and (2.) that it is sustained by immature and sensationalistic, reality-detached people who pursue politics as a kind of video-game (played on Twitter and other such places).
We are forced to make a highly negative assessment of the entire Trump movement, both in theory and certainly now in practice (ie.g., calling for unilaterally annexing foreign territories and even countries; yielding to the temptation, as if it's nothing, to engage in interventionist bombings to support Israel; plotting with glee how to humiliate and undermine Europe).
The harsh reality: the Trump phenomenon is never what its more-principled supporters wanted it to be. The people who have attached themselves to the thing are often unprincipled, weak, opportunists who rode the coattails of an anti-intellectual demagogic movement and who now go along with it.
I suspect Trump is supporting Israel owing to some large campaign donations.
What part of "Sent to live in the Ontario Autonomous Oblast" as a punishment for our enemies doesn't sound good?
Otherwise, the good part of Canada is in the West. Alberta oil and gas; Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia farmland and forests. Accept these as states, and let Ottawa keep the rest.
They don’t want to join.
It's telling that Trump didn't bring up his designs for Greenland, Canada, or Panama during the campaign. We didn't vote for this and he doesn't have a mandate for it. Tell Trump Jr he can run on this platform in 2028.
There is an "anti-Western" element to the Trump people. Steve Sailer touched on in the Taki-Mag article but doesn't examine it directly.
That MAGA would be "anti-Western" is ironic. After all, a vague notion of White-Western Revival was why so many core supporters of Trump went with him, against their better judgments in most cases (and why many have stuck around the Trump personality cult).
Vance (whose genetic legacy is half-Hindu) and Hegseth and others reveal their own anti-Western attitude and posture, in both public and private statements. They are highly keen on undermining Western Europe -- and giggling about it. The sense of Western Unity is discarded and mocked. White-Americans have more in common with White-Europeans than they do with Multicultural-Miscellaneous Americans, but in these people's minds it's not only the opposite, but White-Europeans are a hostile enemy.
_________
The extreme pettiness and stupidity of this Blumpf Greenland Grab gambit fits with the Trump people's nonseriousness, of course, -- and of how beholden they really are to a demagogic politics of "just say whatever sounds cool and make us look good, or can intimidate losers into yielding to our whims." But it also fits well with the anti-Western posture from these people.
A few wags, back in 2024, were saying MAGA would truly achieve Wokeness. This string of embarrassments, such as the Greenland Grab gambit, bear that out very much. These kinds of tough-guy actions appeal to Third Worlders (see my: https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2025/02/26/the-trump-as-caudillo-theory-revisited-reversing-third-worldization-through-another-form-of-third-worldization/).
____________
These b.1970s, b.1980s Trump-II people's minds have been clouded and distorted by some negative influences of their time. The influence of political Zionism -- the Jewish Lobby and its activities on behalf of the Israeli hegemonic-drive in the Middle East -- is very clear. But I think it goes further: These Trump-II people think of the USA as a giant Israel.
In the Israel story, Europe is a obstruction or an enemy. I think to some extent these Trump-II people "buy" that idea. They have lost touch with reality; the reality, anyway, of what a Western Man should do in the world.
These Trump-II people do not think of the USA in the way everyone else has thought of it since the 17th century, as an extension of Western Civilization (primarily NW-European Protestant from the start; and still today shaped by those norms and with such a ethnocultural core).
A Trump government: a quasi-anti-Western Wokeness and aggressive Jewish ethnonationalism (Zionism) with a 'MAGA' cap on?
Vance does seem surprisingly anti-European. Is his thinking, influenced by Mrs Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, that European blood has stagnated and needs to be replenished by dynamic Hindu Aryans and Greenland’s Inuits?
"Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us." -- J. D. Vance, October 2016
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/jd-vance-october-2016-on-trump-as-reprehensible-and-muslims-and-immigrants.jpg
Vance was then 32. By the early 2020s he had supposedly remade himself, if you believed the hype from some quarters, into some species of White-ethnonationalist, albeit an odd one who is friends with Mencius Moldbug, Horam Hazony (an Israeli financier highly interested in managing U.S. identity and politics), and other intellectual-cool-guy power-brokers. By 2022 and 2023, he is a little too willing to loudly declare he "doesn't care about Ukraine," and now this steady flow of anti-European comments from the man.
IMO, we have to ask a few basic questions about Vance: Who is he? What game is he playing? He met and married a Hindu-elite in 2013-14. Why? How, exactly, did he end up in an elite position, given that he comes, relatively speaking, out of nowhere? Something seems odd about it.
But to be specific about his political identity between about ages 25 to age 40 (2009 to 2025):
When was J.D. Vance "pretending"?
Was he pretending in the mid-late 2010s (anti-Trump, pro-Immigration, pro-Diversity)? Or is he pretending now, in the early-mid 2020s?
The most-charitable alternative is, "He changed his mind." Okay, but if something made him change his views on race-and-nation issues (the "nonwhite children" he has bragged of notwithstanding), what was it?
Do people really have such major ideological changes in their late thirties, as Vance was during his supposed epiphany? In other words, how many other b.1984 White men who, in 2016, were condemning racism would, within ca. five years, have been (supposedly) championing the other side? Isn't that more the kind of transformation typically seen between ages 15 and 20? Or 20 and 25? (Not 32 and ca. 37).
If we go with the "Vance changed his views" explanation, is it possible that he has never HAD stable political views? The allegation of "opportunism" is generally lazy, but maybe it's more like being a yes-man for cool-guy views he thinks are in, as also seen (e.g.) by his following many right-wing Twitter-troll accounts in/by the early 2020s.
Alas, we are back to: Who is J.D. Vance? There has been a lot of hype about this character, going back to the release of his book in 2016 and continuing up thru 2024. I don't have any good answers, except this one: He may not at all be what his fans (including the now-slavishly pro-Trump cheerleader Tucker Carlson) think he is.
A lot of successful people with mild normie views were radicalized over the course of 2016-24.
The question I keep asking in Vance's case is: Radicalized from what to what?
And the other possibility is he didn't change his own views in the way most people do, but floated through the previous decade following perceived consensus all along. In other words, "normie" is probably best thought of as relative and not an absolute.
"These Trump-II people think of the USA as a giant Israel."
Wait, isn't that something that folks on the dissident right have been demanding for years? "We just want what Israel has!"
Few of them looked deeply into what that would actually mean. But our host did muse about it back in 2022: https://www.unz.com/isteve/can-a-party-unite-the-working-class-and-the-executive-class/
"One suggestion is by Likud being Israel’s party promoting anti-white racism within Israel. Likud is the party for everybody who resents both Arabs and Israel’s founding fathers, who were leftist secular European Jews, especially sophisticated German Ashkenazis.
What would be the American equivalent? It would be a party striving to unify everybody who resents post-Puritan northerners, to use the Albion’s Seed category. Call the bad guys “Mayflower descendants.” (Perhaps this is what Mencius Moldbug is up to?) Build a Bakersfield Coalition of rednecks, Latinos, and big owners."
"25th of 166 countries in military spending"
Huh?
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/24/global-military-spending-2022-us-china-russia-list
As % of GDP
GDP is a poor economic metric
The USA's is inflated by 20-25%: subtract the revenue from price gouging by oligopoly co's, omit all MIC revenue, & take out 20% of the healthcare sector which would not be necessary if people ate & exercised correctly. Dah dah! $22 Trillion
& not even touching the finance sector!
You could also do "military expenditure per capita." In that case, the USA is the close peer in "military spending" with the following countries:
1. Israel
2. USA
3. UAE
4. Singapore
5. Kuwait
6. Saudi Arabia
7. Norway
8. Australia
These countries all spent over $1000 per-capita on military costs in 2019, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Israel was first, at $2402/capita. The USA, under Trump-I, was second at $2224. Australia made the list with $1028/capita in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest_military_expenditure_per_capita
Adding in the countries above $500/capita in military spending in 2019, the list expands to:
9.) Brunei
10.) South Korea
11.) Bahrain
12.) Denmark
13.) France
14.) UK
15.) Finland
16.) Netherlands
17.) Luxembourg
18.) New Zealand
19.) Switzerland
20.) Canada
21.) Germany
22.) Sweden
23.) Greece
24.) Estonia. (Estonia should be included if rounding up to $500 for 2019; by 2025, Estonia is firmly in this club and has probably moved up a number of slots from above its 25th-place in 2019. Although small, Estonia seeks to be a bulwark-state for Germanic Western-Europe against Russia; and is highly paranoid of Russian designs on itself, not without historical reason.)
Failing to make the $500 cutoff in 2019: 25.) Russia, 26.) Italy, 27.) Portugal, 28.) Taiwan, 29.) Belgium, 30.) Lithuania, 40.) Japan, 41.) Latvia, 42.) Lebanon, 43.) Spain, 44.) Austria, 45.) Slovakia, 46.) Cyprus, 47.) Uruguay, 48.) Poland, 49.) Bulgaria, 50.) Slovenia.... and so on, with China at 67th place (
Russia's embarrassing failures in the Ukraine War of the past 38 months (early 2022 to mid-2025) were because of its own inherent economic weaknesses; it was not pacifism that led Russia to be unable, in the 2010s, to even maintain consistently a $500/capita military-spending level, falling below it in 2019. Even a $500/capita level would've only been one-fifth the USA's per-capita level (and the USA has 2.5x the population).
With both the first list ($1000/capita+ spenders) and the broader list ($500/capita spenders), you are looking mostly just at a proxy for how wealthy a given state is. The biggest single exception must be militaristic Israel.
Israel's long-term goal is clearly not only the elimination of the Palestinians as a pesky nuisance-population, but in becoming unquestioned regional hegemon and with major influence over the USA and Europe, giving them a serious degree of global power.
For Israel to achieve its goals it needs (1.) heavy spending of its own; (2.) subsidy and alliance-like ties to the USA; and therefore (3.) tight control over swathes of U.S. politics, which you've seen with Trump-I, Biden, and most especially Trump-II so far.
For most of his adult life, Donald Trump has been a real estate developer. Among the various things they do, developers deal in —-land.
He has also referenced the Guilded Age without irony as a high point in American history. He has praised the presidency of William McKinley. During his administration, McKinley gained Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines (as well as control over Cuba).
Perhaps Trump instinctively grasps that in order to be considered a great president in history, one has to acquire land.
To be honest, what does Denmark really need Greenland for anyway? They might as well give Greenland their independence, or hold a national vote on the matter. Whereas Greenland is near the Arctic Circle and not very far away from Russia. So National Security could help frame the debate.
Also one piece of land that is quite relevant to national security that Steve omitted from his article is Trump’s desire to re-acquire the Panama Canal. The US built the Canal in 1904 and controlled it until it was given to Panama in the late ‘70’s. Better the US to control the Canal again as opposed to China, which would be in violation of the Monroe Doctrine.
Yep, acquiring land definitely will place a president in the history books as a true leader as well as a success. Perhaps it really would take a former developer, one who has worked in acquiring buildings land and developing them to find a way to successfully make this happen.
What your analysis misses is that all of Western Europe has been 100% pro-US since 1945 (and elements of Western Europe were going that direction some decades earlier already).
Not just Greenland, but Denmark itself, and all of the core NATO bloc, are were already in a tight geopolitical bloc-relationship with the USA. 100% cooperation and common cause, a more-friendly relationship hardly possible. There is no need, for security, for this Greenland Grab gambit. OTOH, it considerably undermines U.S. prestige and honor, and is almost scripted as if to be from a movie villain.
The USA under DJT and these amateurish people, we really does look like the villain. What damage may be done before this is all over, God help us.
There is a need for security vs say…Russia, as Russia isn’t so far away from Greenland.
Also the point remains: just as national security should dictate our interests in acquiring Greenland, so too should national security interests dictate our interests in re-acquiring the Panama Canal, to prevent say, China from either acquiring it or at the very least attempt to gain control over it. As far as US realpolitik is concerned, The Monroe Doctrine must be maintained.
With any luck, they'll accidentally invite Frederiksen on a WhatsApp (or was it AOL Instant Messenger?) chat about plans to invade Greenland, giving her ample time to head it off at the pass.
I'm running out of popcorn.
If Blumpf ordered an armed seizure of the place, would any of these second-rate yes-men resign? Instead of participating in such a highly stupid invasion of Greenland (an ally), attempt to block the self-defeating malevolent stupidity and, if impossible, resigning out of principle.
I’m happy to engage with any points you choose to make, but as soon as I see “Blumpf”, I stop reading. It’s like Chimpy or Bushitler 20 years ago.
Republicans have long resisted the very sensible arguments for admitting DC and Puerto Rico as full states. This is because they are afraid that they would be Democrat strongholds.
Would they take the risk of giving 55,000-population Greenland two senators?!
Has anyone said anything about statehood for Greenland?
If you were a Greenlander would you accept anything less?
If you were a Greenlander could you accept anything more? You and what army? The US could literally just pay all 55,000 citizens $1,000,000 to vote for statehood.
Army? The US has an airbase basically forever which is all it needs!
Greenland residents would be smarter voters than inhabitants of PR or DC
Well I mean it's a valid fear, n'est-ce pas? I remember when I was very young being very sad that DC refused to vote for Ronald Reagan and I asked my father why they wouldn't when he lived there. My father, who wasn't racist per se, told me point blank that n-people don't vote Republican
It would not surprise me if Trump got more black votes in DC than white ones in 2024.
It would surprise me a great deal. I think that's more a phenomenon in Atlanta, Dallas and other cities in Red State America.
Not to mention 35 million Canadians.
-- MAKE AMERICA GO AWAY (MAGA) cap introduced --
A Greenlandic patriot, Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen, has produced a new MAGA cap as he and others try to rally unity and resistance against Blumpfian imperialism:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/make-america-go-away-cap-aannguaq-reimer-johansen-greenland-2025.jpg
The cap, in red with white font, copies the design Blumpf made famous. It says “Make America Go Away.” The main symbol of the Greenlandic flag appears on the side.
The creator and promoter of the cap, Mr. Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen, has plenty of White-European ancestry combined with substantial Inuit-Eskimo ancestry via his mother. That assessment is after a review of his public Facebook page, which is where he first introduced the cap and started gaining what has been, be Greenlandic standards, major attention.
Also of interest on this unlikely Greenlandic hero of the hour: Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen is involved with the Greenlandic trading company KNI A/S, where he is a “maneger.” KNI A/S is “the successor to the Royal Greenland Trading Department, which controlled the government of Greenland itself from 1774 to 1908 and possessed a monopoly on Greenlandic trade from 1776 to 1950. Today, the company remains a major component of the Greenlandic economy and remains fully owned by the local government.”
The history of this company, now called KNI A/S, is testament to Greenland’s long centuries as a protectorate of Denmark. Blumpf blunders in and says “Hey, there’s no reason they should have ties to Greenland; I wanna grab it, get lost.; no time for talk; have my people get on a messaging app to coordinate out campaign to undermine these Greenlandic bozos, and prepare slots in that El Salvador mega-prison for Greenlandic dissidents and resisters. And Canada, you’re next.”
___________
Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen posted a message, in the Inuit language and Danish, accompanying his “Make America Go Away” cap. The Danish version auto-translates as:
___________
(QUOTE --- Aannguaq Reimer-Johansen, Facebook) (Auto-translated)
Call to citizens: Vance’s wife’s visit is a charm offensive.
If you take a smiling selfie with them, you send a signal to the whole world that you love the United States and want to be a part of it.
Therefore, do not show interest.
We have already shown our position through a large demonstration. Let’s stand firm and stick together.
____________
(Orig.)
Sisimiuni innuttaasoqatinnut innersuut: Vancep nuliata tikeraarnera qujangeqqusaarneruvoq. Qungujukkussigit qungujullusiluunniit assileqatigigussigit nunarsuarmi tamat paasitissuasi USA nuannaralugu peqataaffigerusullugulu. Innersuukkusunnarpoq soqutigineqassanngittut, akerliussutsimik takutitserujussuaqqammerpungut tamanna attallungu soqutiginaveersaarniartingit.
Opfordring til borgere: Vances kones besøge er en charmeoffensiv. Hvis I tager et smilende selfie med dem, sender I et signal til hele verden om, at I elsker USA og ønsker at være en del af det. Lad derfor være med at vise interesse. Vi har allerede vist vores holdning gennem en stor demonstration. Lad os stå fast og holde sammen.
https://www.facebook.com/aannguaqreimer.mathiassen.3/posts/10229679953091879
____________
The original was posted on the weekend of March 22-23. That was after the White House announced the Hindu-brahmin-elite wife of the USA’s anti-European vice president would make a leisurely tour of scenic Greenland. The main stop being to observe the famous dogsled races (probably along with a contingent of security officials). That particular part of the USA’s latest pressure campaign has now reportedly been altered. But the "Make America Go Away" Greenlandic MAGA cap remains.
As the US devolves into violent sectarianism I personally welcome any additions to Team Red State.
Europe and Canada are moving from allies to Third World chaos agents. The US is becoming white people's last stand, the other Five Eyes countries having made clear their ultimate goal is the disenfranchisement and dismantling of their current white majorities.
What good can come of Canada being ruled by Han and Hindu cartels and continuing to import millions of Muslim Arabs and Africans? Same for Europe.
As our former allies are literally transforming themselves into Global South countries, we grab Alberta, Saskatchewan, Greenland, and the Canal Zone and prepare to defend ourselves.
It occurs to me that Israel is pursuing this strategy in its neighborhood, pushing into Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, and holding Hezbollah under threat of extinction. Putin is doing the same thing in Ukraine, which the Atlanticists regard as the tip of the spear against the Tsar and his anti-Pride Parade minions.
Absorbing the entirety of Canada and giving them full voting rights in the U.S. system would tilt the USA's electoral politics decidedly to the Left, as Sailer writes.
Trump has not proposed picking off parts of western Canada.
Nor has he said anything about protecting White-Western people's interests. His own team of yes-men displays a degree of Third Worldism of their own, and is plenty heavy on bringing in foreign elites.
I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It would be lovely to have a white nation-state republic debating marginal tax rates until the end of time but that bridge was crossed long ago.
The idea of admitting oil-rich, conservative Calgary as the 51st state, the northern Texas, has been around for awhile, but all of Canada?
An interesting fact about Scandinavian-colony Greenland vs quasi-US-colony Liberia:
Greenland is said to have 57,000 residents; Liberia is said to have 5,500,000. Greenland's total GDP and Liberia's total GDP are, however, about the same (both +/- $4 billion, nominal).
In per-capita nominal GDP, Greenland may be about 75x richer than Liberia. Danish-colony Greenland has done very well. Liberia, founded by ex-US slaves, has done very NOT well. Liberia has done even more poorly, generally speaking, than the norm in West Africa.
Why Greenland?
I think it’s time to admit that we’ve elected an old guy who, at his best, was sometimes successful primarily for his boundless chutzpah, not his brains or his character.
Greenland might have some Arctic trade-route or missile warning angle, but if so, why can’t anyone advance the argument. Trump certainly can’t. Vance could, but hasn’t, so I’m left to assume it’s just another random old-guy rambling that he hasn’t yet forgotten.
Steve Sailer's decision to conspicuously decline to endorse Trump in the 2015-16 cycle, 2020, or 2024 looks like a better call with every passing week.
I don't endorse political candidates.
Idea: --- I'd love to read a ranked list of your "best to worst presidents," of those you've seen, i.e., from your living memory and along Sailerian "my vague impression" lines. Not endorsing candidates but evaluating past presidents/administrations (and possibly the current one, so far, its many trainwrecks being more smoke than fire, so far...)
I thought the GQ (Greenland question) was a fun little side show but Steve has now convinced me - leave them the hell alone.
"The main internationally recognized exception was India adding some territories, such as the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1962 and formerly independent Sikkim in 1975."
Fun Sikkim fact(?): for a few summers in the 1970s my family would go to White Grass Ranch in Jackson Hole for a week on the way to visit my grandparents in Colorado, and at this dude ranch there was an alcoholic-seeming older man called Cookey, who ran rafting trips on the Snake River etc. My mother told me that this guy was the father of Hope Cooke, the last queen of Sikkim or whatever the title was. When she told me about it I found the whole idea impossibly glamorous, but my mother wasn't a fabulist, and it's highly possible that it was actually true...
Anyway, apparently Hope Cooke is still with us as I just learned from Wikipedia, where her entry is well worth a look. Among other things turns out she was married for a while in the 1980s to Mike Wallace–the historian of New York and author of Gotham, not the other one. I sat next to him at a dinner party in NYC twenty-some years ago: a very pleasant and unsurprisingly interesting guy. I wish I'd known about the Hope Cooke business then so I could have asked him about Cookey.