New Euphemisms for Imperialist Behavior? | Greenland, Canada and Panama on Blog#42

New terms of art for a well-known behavior... Don't be fooled!

These are mighty strange times to be alive for someone like me, who, as a young child, got to witness the period immediately after the end of the French protectorate and the beginning of partial self-rule in North Africa. As an adult, I witnessed Moroccan culture shedding its colonial influences. I received my early education alongside pupils whose parents were among the first civil servants in their countries’ postcolonial journey.

The transposition of a reverse process for that experience onto Greenland, Panama, or even Canada is unimaginable to me. But here we are on a very strange precipice for America…

Would taking Greenland or Panama exactly parallel France’s taking of North Africa? One would normally assume that even an America that transitions from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and back to Trump again, that America could never have undergone the necessary ideological transformation processes required to make the jump from democracy to colonialist aggression in one fell swoop, especially when America saw its start in anti-colonialist upheaval. But that upheaval, we cannot forget or ignore, was mired in a slavery that America has yet to atone for in any kind of direct and formal fashion.

Another way to look at it is the German example. Hitler’s rise to power began in 1919, with his infiltration of the Worker’s party, and 1920, with him taking charge of party propaganda. After that, it took until 1933 for Hitler to be elected chancellor and another five years for Anschluss (the annexation of Austria) to take place.

Trump’s first term as president ran from January 2017 to January 2021. While there was a kerfuffle between Trump and the then newly elected Danish prime minister that ended with Trump canceling his trip to Denmark, there were no threats of forcible taking of territories or any kind of “frontier” doctrine for imperialist territorial aspirations during his first term. The Biden term that is ending now did not have any such aspirations, either.

Have we wanted to negotiate more access to Greenland for national security? Sure. We have. Have we wanted more than we’ve been able to negotiate? Sure. We, however, have never threatened Denmark or Greenland with an invasion. For decades, we have relied on our diplomats to do diplomacy. Here is former Ambassador and Trump I national security advisor, John Bolton, with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins:

This time around, Trump is much more forceful in his belligerent talk while Americans are much more optimistic about a Trump second term, naively believing that his top focus will be alleviating their economic malaise. This view isn’t only shared by Trump voters, but also voters who didn’t bother to participate in the 2024 election.

CBS news and other outlets have reported that “A majority of Americans are optimistic about the next four years with Donald Trump, even more so than they were in 2017 before his first term. And most are hopeful about the coming year.

That's bolstered by Americans' expectations for a good economy in 2025 — higher than they currently rate it — along with wide belief among his voters that Trump will bring down grocery prices, make them financially better off and bring more peace and stability to the world.”

All throughout the 2024 general election campaign, we were told that voters dismissed some of Trump’s more outlandish campaign promises as mere bluster. You can see in the graphic below that voters continue to cling to this belief.

This makes us even more vulnerable than last time around for several reasons:

1. The passage of time and Americans’ propensity to forget or remember more fondly events that weren’t pleasant

2. The free flow of disinformation and misinformation, aided and abetted by social media and Big Media, itself, and, now, Trump’s vow to restore Tik-Tok’s ability to operate in the U.S.

3. A very frayed common font of knowledge rooted in both uneven education across the 50 states, and paired with uneven access to good sources of news

By thinning out the common font of knowledge, we have created a society in which those who know are knowingly blinding those who know less in order to gain supremacy, using divide and conquer approaches that have largely been successful.

Might Americans really be OK with aggression against Greenland now? It is certainly a possibility, even though current polls show that voters think this is just positioning on the part of Trump ahead of negotiations. Just ten years ago, this sort of talk would have been grounds for a sizable number of people to go out and demonstrate. Today, it’s difficult to know how many among us are aware of the same set of news headlines and content. This will not improve as we go along.

What happened to us?

A lot has happened, and it has taken decades for us to get to this point in time. For our purposes, I am starting with the end of the Reagan era and the first Clinton administration. This is the time period in which some significant changes took place.

Ronald Reagan, for all the talk of reform in his administration, never did pass education reform. It is Bill Clinton who did using a tactic that would become known as triangulation, as I explain in my September 2017 article on triangulation:

A year into Clinton’s first term, lack of preparedness, setbacks, broken promises, scandal. and a presidency in trouble – all pushed Bill Clinton into taking a brand new tack: triangulation. In addition to the definition of triangulation offered by Dick Morris in his Frontline appearance on PBS, here is a quote from his book:

“The idea behind triangulation is to work hard to solve the problems that motivate the other party’s voters, so as to defang them politically… The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.”

The problem with that is that triangulation has not quite worked out that way. “Their car” wasn’t what was actually being fixed. What the “tools” did address, however, were the goals of the Republican party. Those are separate and distinct from the needs of their voters or the Democrats’. In fact, the needs of the people, no matter their political bent, are identical: a steady supply of sustaining jobs, affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, education, etc. Triangulation gave both parties’ donors what they wanted, cutting deeper into what voters needed, moving both parties far away from their respective core ideologies.

This is the full PBS documentary on the partnership between Bill Clinton and Dick Morris. Virtually all of the administration alums appear on it, including George Stephanopoulos and Robert Reich.

What does this have to do with Trumpism and possible imperialist colonial aggression?

The most pernicious thing this has done is to condition us to accept compromise - any kind of compromise - under the guise of centrist bipartisanship, ignoring completely that one side is playing a zero-sum game, while the other is playing the part of the adult in the room while shirking, completely, its responsibility to ensure that the game is played on a level playing field. Other than the Tik-Tok ban, there has been no legislation to regulate social media and put any type of guardrails in place.

In the intervening decades since the last major education reform, the former robustness of our public education system has degraded in meaningful ways. While we’ve been consumed with various aspects of standardized test scores, the right has been busy changing the very nature of what it is we get out of our collective effort at educating our young. As we were busy getting on the school choice/charter bandwagon, they were removing the humanities from the curriculum. While we were pushing STEM, they were busy removing the humanities from the curriculum. They were busy at the local and state levels while we were otherwise distracted - to the point where, in 2012, the Texas GOP came out openly in its opposition to teaching critical thinking in public education. Texas has an outsized influence in what goes into textbooks nationwide. Then, the COVID lockdown didn’t help matters and children of all ages fell further behind in reading, math, and science.

Alongside much of this, Republicans have been very successful in fostering a resentment of the “elites.” Who do they mean when they talk about elites? They don’t mean Elon Musk, Donald Trump or the hundreds of captains of industry who hold America hostage to their wealth and influence. They mean college professors, people with college degrees… the middle class, really. To lower middle class and working class Americans, having a target for their misery and a sentiment defined like this has worked. Over time, Democrats lost the working class base they always had.

Kamala Harris tried to do a bit of correction during her failed 2024 campaign when she addressed college and began a conversation about there being a need for two-year degrees in the trades and not necessarily academic degrees. That is true enough. Not everyone can or should obtain an academic degree - not because of some inability to master academic topics, but because we all have different aspirations in life. What she didn’t talk about is the foundation we all receive in K-12. That foundation has been frayed to tatters over time and is what has contributed to the ease of conversion Republicans have had in widening their base of voters. CNN’s Elle Reeve has done extensive reporting that shows what voters know and understand about the choices they make.

Republicans have taken advantage of the situation that has been created in the last 20 years, with education being discussed in terms of the failure of students to increase their test scores due to a failure of a nebulous “education system” and focusing on how to better serve industries of the future through education, instilling a sense of shame among the lower classes in the process. One should note that most of those talking heads, themselves, have degrees from Ivy league institutions.

Elitism is often tackled by the talking heads on TV, but it is never clearly defined, explained, and discussed alongside a recounting of what has happened to our system of education.

In 2017, in what I consider to be revelatory, this landmark article was published in Scientific American, about the work of Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg:

The key takeaway in this interview is the following**:

“IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world, and in the U.S., that increase is continuing. That’s huge; that’s two standard deviations, which is like the difference between an average IQ of 100 and a gifted IQ of 130. We should be happy about this, but the question I ask is, If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imagined—one wonders, What about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping?

What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people; we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.”

Look at us now?

By narrowing our learning to excel especially in particular fields at the expense of a well-rounded general education for all - first - we’ve molded ourselves into a less savvy, misguided, more narrow-minded, hyper-specialist nation. The advent of corporate-guided social media has accelerated some of the side-effects of this hyper-specialization process in ways that have made our entire population vulnerable to manipulation from all corners of the political and bad actor spectra. Add in media bias and outright manipulation and we find ourselves having crossed a rubicon we may not be able to get back from.

The Washington Post is hardly the only publication that now has an oligarch owner who engages in overt interference in day to day editorial and news operations. The owner of the L.A. Times has been even more overt and aggressive in his approach to newspaper ownership, as scooped by former CNN media reporter, Oliver Darcy. Other than rightifying the newspaper’s editorial pages through the hiring of Scott Jennings, best known for his pugilistic appearances on CNN, he is also using him as a consultant to help transform the LA Times.

We’ve watched Rupert Murdoch do this for decades first, in Australia, then the U.K., then in the U.S. through the many publications and broadcast media he’s acquired over time. Of the three, Murdoch has been most successful in changing the political landscape.

Now, for the social media layer…

Social media is how a large number of Americans, young, old, and in between get their news, whether from push notifications from the apps of news organizations on our phones, or push notifications we’ve authorized from social media apps such as X, Facebook, Tik-Tok, etc. Whatever publisher, and they are ALL publishers, you have invited into your world through your smartphone, *they* are the ones who decide what to prioritize for you as newsworthy. They are also the ones who decide for you what to deemphasize. Either way, you are at their mercy for the things you learn on any given day. This is as true of Facebook and X, as it is of actual news organizations. They all use algorithms to serve up whatever they think you want to see on your timeline. Over the last few years, we’ve seen quite a bit of reporting from CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan. He’s the network’s disinformation reporter. Here is a YouTube compilation playlist of Donie’s past reports:

We’ve just seen the cavalcade of oligarchs making the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lardo to pay homage to Donald Trump ahead of the start of his second term, and offering the complete roll-back of every promise of due diligence made in the last ten years. What Mark Zuckerberg has said he will undo is pretty stupendous if you remember any of his appearances in Congress, under oath.

The vulnerability on display here is what Robert Sternberg describes when he talks about Smart Fools. They’re smart enough to go about life successfully, but not wise enough to avoid certain types of traps.

So, now that we are about to enter the second Trump era, what big changes, in terms of direction the whole nation will go in, are we about to see? Surprisingly, we are about to be served up an old idea wrapped up in fancy, technobabbly new terms.

Trump’s attitude on Canada, Panama, and Greenland are no accident. Neither are some rather strange articles in the media about the origins of these territorial claims or the foreign policy views on them. When trying to understand where this is all coming from, one must begin with the fact that Trump and his advisors are anti-NATO. To them, it doesn’t matter that an act of aggression against a NATO member triggers an obligation on the part of the US and all other NATO members to… defend the NATO member under foreign aggression, even if it is by another member of NATO.

This is where Elon Musk comes in, with his secret relationship with Vladimir Putin, Shi Jinping and the access he’s long had to some of our nation’s top secret information. This is also where Musk’s South African Boer roots also come in.

From Wikipedia’s entry on the Boers:

During apartheid, Boer was used by opponents of apartheid in various contexts, referring to institutional structures such as the National Party, or to specific groups of people, such as members of the Police Force (colloquially known as Boere) and Army, Afrikaners, or white South Africans generally.^[32][33] This usage is often viewed as pejorative in contemporary South Africa.

We’ve seen the latter expressed in his racist attitude toward some of the workers at his Tesla factories, for example. We’ve also seen it expressed in his union-busting views.

So why Greenland? For one, lots of precious minerals and raw materials essential to his space business. Next, lots of virgin land Musk can move some of his operations to. That, in part, is likely what DOGE will be about. From DOGE, now that Ramaswamy will be busy running for governor of Ohio, Musk will be free to examine the federal government’s portfolio of holdings, weaken some agencies for his private purposes, dismantle those agencies he wants for himself, and buy them up for pennies on the dollar. A big clue to the powers Musk will have will be in the way DOGE is set up by Congress and what powers the new agency will be granted.

To ensure Trump’s Greenland goals are met, Musk may have managed to secure an ambassadorship to Denmark for an old buddy of his from his PayPal days:

A founding member of the “PayPal Mafia” is the man that Donald Trump has chosen to help America take over Greenland. Ken Howery, who formerly served as the chief financial officer of the online payments app, is also known for his longstanding ties to two other pivotal members of that aforementioned “mafia”: tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Howery, who previously served in the first Trump administration as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden between 2019 and 2021, has been selected as Trump’s new ambassador to Denmark.

Remember, the two most prominent founders of PayPal are Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel is the patron oligarch of our new Vice President and author of Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance. Howery may be less well known, but he is still a founder and member of Musk’s clique.

As for what we will be told? Well, just take a look at the quote from Politico’s January 16 article: The spiritual case for Greenland.

But in the corner of the conservative movement known as the New Right, where Trump’s hardline American nationalism co-exists alongside a strong strain of techno-utopianism, Trump’s defenders are making a less conventional — though no less influential — case for taking Greenland. In the eyes of many of the New Right, taking Greenland isn’t just in America’s material and strategic interests; it’s also key to America’s spiritual wellbeing.

Versions of this argument vary from the Wild West-y to the genuinely wacky: Some on the New Right argue that acquiring Greenland would represent the opening of a new American frontier, reviving the “frontier mentality” and “settler spirit” that imbued the American pioneers largely of the 19th century. Others argue that Greenland could serve as a sort of spiritual and technological staging ground for more ambitious feats of American expansion, including the eventual settlement of Mars.

Make no mistake, this is imperialist colonialist talk wrapped in techno-utopian frontier nostalgia intended to rile us, as divided and hapless unsophisticated American Smart Fools.

If you thought that Trump’s associations were problematic the first time around, with Stephen Miller being the poster child for anti-immigrant racism, there are far more powerful, pernicious people around him, this time around.

With so many Democrats in the House and Senate having already signaled their eagerness to work with DOGE, what could possibly go wrong?

A lot…

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** For those among you who are psychologists or are just so inclined, here is Sternberg’s talk at the 2017 APS in Boston:

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