Trump's simply a very bad person, declining into senility. Who is backing him?

And by backing him, let's leave MAGA to the end of the discussion, although we'll address it.

Last week we saw Donald Trump at his outright worse.  He delivered a speech in what would normally be prime time, although it wasn't covered on two of the major networks in what seems to have been an extraordinarily late acknowledgement that he's a lying liar who lies and a danger to  humanity.  He's been trying to subvert democracy for years.  The speech this past week was an open declaration of war against the franchise.

This has been oblivious to the point of absurdity now for months and to anyone who cared to pay attention for years.  We've discussed this several times over the past couple of years.  For those of certain age, the rise of Trump has been an almost indecipherable phenomenon, although we've discussed and tried to decipher it quite a few times (and frankly, we've been largely correct).

Where we were wrong, however, is in predicting that the 25th Amendment would be applied to him. . . by now.  We still feel there's a good chance, but its fundamentally different than it was previously. At this point the non fanatic elements around him, such as they are, must be talking.  It could take any number of roads, from a Curragh Mutiny to a type of the Blue Flu.  We'll see.

What's very clear, is that the non MAGA forces, mostly in the Democratic Party, but elsewhere, must, and will, start mobilizing. Trump's a menace to humanity.  And to add to that, the speech fell flat and even m many Republicans have openly admitted that it not only failed to miss the target, the gun was never loaded.  It came across as the pathetic ramblings of a demented old man.

What's crystal clear at this point is that Donald Trump is working right now on stealing the 2026 elections.  He's doing everything he can, with a major effort being the SAVE act which would have the immediate effect of wiping out the ability of huge numbers of Americans to vote.  So far it appears unlikely to pass, although that cannot be assured.  The next step is going to be a direct attack on the polls themselves. Trump will station his SA and perhaps even the military at polling locations he wishes to disrupt and following the election he's going to proclaim the results invalid.

That's not a maybe. This will occur.

Trump's goals are personal.  He's mentally ill and he's never been mentally right.  He was a bully as a child which caused his parents to send him to military school.  He helped his father deride his troubled brother.  His life has been based on greed, greed for money and greed for a certain profile of women.  He's been a frequent failure at business and frankly he's not that smart.  He is a good salesmen, however, and he sold his image and reputation multiple times over the years, finally selling it to viewers of American television stupidly, a sales job that got him into office.  He lost the 2020 election and cannot personally stand to be thought of as a loser.

Stealing the election for him is personal, not political.  

So, with that being the case, why would any sane person support him, and who are they?

The Useful Idiot

Let's start with what's really the case with Trump. Why are people surrounding him willing to put up with him?  Why are they willing to soil themselves with lavish heaps of praise on the man?  Do they really adore and admire him the way they say they do?

Not likely, save for a very limited few.

No, he's a useful idiot.  And he's a useful idiot for two of the camps in his circle.  They are, however, two camps.  And their goals are not the same.

The Francoist

The coat of arms of the Spanish Francoist state.  The motto is "Una Gran de Libre", a Latinized version of the motto in Spanish which was "Una Grande y Libre"; "one, great, and free".

Back in 2024, not long ago, an intern to Harriet Hageman, Gabe Saint, lost his position when his social media contest was discovered.  It included links to Francoist, as well as to Groypers, like Nick Fuentes.

What's this have to do with Trump?

Quite a lot.

Now, Trump wouldn't know Saint from Adam, but the fact of the matter is that a far right Wyoming politicians had somebody on her staff who was effectively a Francoist Groyper, and only the seeming embarrassment of that, at the time, cause Saint to drop off her staff. Saint, however, didn't disappear.  He remained in the background, associated with Charlie Kirk's organization, and popping up every now and then in the far right Wyoming Freedom Caucus camp. 

Now, I bet it'd make hardly any difference at all.

Una Gran de Libre.

Groypers are, to a certain extent, the SA or the Roter Frontkämpferbund.  Some have a grasp of what they're fighting for, but that grasp is on a big scale from fully committed Ernst Röhm's who very much do, to single basement dwelling 20 something men who are mad at the world because they can't get a date.  There's every scale in between.  But the Francoist element has tapped into a real movement, and that movement, small though it is, is National Conservatism.

National Conservatism is very closely aligned, in some quarters, with Christian Nationalism.  It has a real thesis, and it has a real set of intellectuals behind it. Those intellectuals are Rod Dreher (who now seems to be questioning it), Patrick Dineen, and Kevin Roberts, amongst others.

J.D. Vance is a close associate of Roberts. Vance is in this camp.

The thesis is this.

The United States is a Western Nation.  All Western Nations are defined by the Edict of Thessalonica (380 A.D.) accepting Christianity in the Roman Empire.  That makes Western Europeans a Christian culture.  Similarly, the Christianization of Russia in 988 makes that region a Christian culture as well.

So far so good .That is essentially correct.  The United States is undoubtedly a Western Nation and in fact Western European culture is undoubtedly defined to an enormous degree by the Roman Empire accepting Christianity (and it is additionally enormously defined by having been in or under the influence of the Roman Empire).

Beyond that, however, National Conservatives (and Christian Nationalist) do not believe in democracy at all.  The reason varies, with some willing to ground it historically in the  French Revolution and its aftermath which is much less connected with religion of any kind than they think.  The French Revolution was, in the cities, definitely opposed to religion, but it was effectively, at its start, mob rule until Napoleon turned cannons on the mob.  The French revolutionaries were operating effectively on the same ethos as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause.

Not all of the French populace as like that at all. And what was occuring in France had been effectively predicted by the writings of the Agrarian Jefferson about large urban populations.

Anyhow, that experience left some in this camp distrustful of democracy to this day.  In their view, democratic states always turn to mob rule, and they always feature declining morality.  And there is evidence they can site to, starting effectively with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade and carrying it through to 2015's Obergefell v. Hodges.  They feel that "liberalism", meant in the classic sense, and liberal democracy, have failed.

The solution, in their mind, is illiberal democracy. That was the political thesis that Viktor Orban operated on, which explains why Rod Dreher had decamped to Hungary (he's unfortunately returned.  Democracy of this type would sort of exist, but in the same fashion that it did, sort of, in Imperial Germany. There would be elections, but what you could really vote on would be predefined in a way.  Serious cultural issues would never be on the ballot.  Those would have been dictated.  So you could only decide matters in a sort of narrow, non cultural, sense.

You can see a lot of that in the warp and woof of the Trump Administration where these figures have had serious influence.  It explains not on the opposition to the fraud of transgenderism, but also the periodic insistence that everyone have more children, by which is meant those of very direct Western European ancestry have more children.  If you look carefully in the background you'll fine that not only are they opposed to abortion, but also to pharmaceutical birth control (and maybe to birth control of any kind).

Now, some conservatives hold these views as well.  I'm not far from some of them, or I outright agree with some of them. But the real difference here is that as National Conservatives do not trust or believe in democracy, these things would be dictated.

Effectively they are for a Francoist state.  

Trump isn't their Franco.

J. D. Vance is.  But they can't get to Vance, or complete their project of illiberal democracy, directly  It has to be camouflaged.  And Donald Trump is a giant orange clown who serves that purpose.

The Roundheads

The second group surrounding Trump are members of an Evangelical Right movement, the New Apostolic Reformation.  Not all precisely aligned, the generally see the United States as a Protestant nation that has gone badly astray and in need of being taken back over so that Puritanism can be restored.  Many hold to Seven Mountains Dominionism holding that there are seven aspects of society that believers seek to and must dominate, those being: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.  If they succeed, and many believe that they will as God has ordained it, the United States will become, effectively, a Calvinist theocratic state.  In that state, only those who closely adhere to a Calvinist world view will really have right, and everything will center around that.  

It's important to note that those holding this view are constantly improperly described as "Christians" or "Christo Fascist".  Most Christians in the United States and the vastly overwhelming number elsewhere do not hold the political or theocratic views that the NAR does by any means.  Indeed, most Christians on earth are Catholics, and the second largest group are Orthodox, with both groups being Apostolic Christians.  Apostolic Christians do not see any country on Earth as ordained with a Christian mission and never have.  NAR adherents are not, we might observe, reading City of God.

They don't, in many instances, even regard Apostolic Christians, who are the original Christians, as Christian.  In this sense they are not only radical, but ignorant.  But as a small radical group, they're reinforced in their ignorance, only tending to lose it when they start to widely associate with other Christians.  

What exactly the NAR would seek is not completely clear as there's enough diversity amongst the Evangelical right to force it to be unclear.  They don't all see things the same way.  But we have major glimpses of it from some of their major figures.  If they had their way, they'd be like the Puritans were in New England, forcing the state to adhere to their religious views.  A lot of what they seek, or rather oppose, is pretty clear, but only where it overlaps with other conservatives.  They're opposed to abortion, transgenderism, and the like.  But there's a lot beyond that.  They generally oppose women being involved in politics and some would remove the right to vote from them.  They don't approve as minorities as not only is this nation to be a Calvinist one, it's to be strictly white one, what it should have been, in their view, had the original 1620 landing formed the complete demographic future of the country.  

When a person realizes what they want, Mike Johnsen's view that he was to be a new Moses makes sense.  He meant it.   

This group does not see Trump as a figure adhering to their movement, but many do see him as divinely ordained.  They believe he's a latter day Cyrus the Great, delivering them but not part of them.  

Trump, accordingly, is their man.

The NAP cannot bring the country into a Calvinist promised land without Trump and they cannot do it within the next two years. They also can't do it with J. D. Vance at the helm.  Vance is a Catholic who hangs around with traditionalist Catholic intellectuals and they don't like Catholics or intellectuals  This is why a figure like Rod Dreher, who helped get us to this disaster, is now worried about the glidepath into what he brought about.  This also helps explain why the 25th Amendment has not been invoked. Vance would actually have the impact of terminating this movement in a major way and they know it.  They need Trump to stay in office.

And by stay in office, I don't mean until 2028, I mean beyond that.

They believe he's protected by God.  They believe that its morally justified to steal the election this year as that's what they need in order to bring their goals about, and they believe that God has decreed that it shall come about.  The wrong people, in their view, do not have rights anyhow.  

Oliver Cromwell, who held very similar views.

Who succeeds Trump in 2032, or even later than  that, is something they aren't focused on.  It's not Johnson.  Moses was not allowed to enter the Holy Land.  It'll be somebody else, after all the corrupt and debased influences of liberalism are put to rest.

Fellow travelers.

Those are the two main forces in Trump's cabinet and orbit.  Vance is the primary National Conservative in the cabinet, with Rubio tilting towards it.  Behind the scenes you have people like Bannon, Fuentes, Bishop Robert Barron, and others.  The NAR is better represented, with people like Johnson being prominent.  The conflict between the two, as noted, is what I think is keeping our prediction of the 20th Amendment from being invoked from occurring. The National Conservatives aren't strong enough to bring it about.

But  there are others who are in the orbit.  That keeps this nightmare going as well.

• The Confederates.

Diehard ignorant racism has always been there, but it actually increased in the first half of the 19th Century, and ultimately of course gave rise to the Civil War.  The losers in that war never accepted the results, and unfortunately a forgiving nature in American culture allowed them to get away with that. Had Radical Reconstruction being carried out, much of what we're enduring right now would not be occurring.  The 1877 abandonment of Reconstruction allowed Southern oligarchs to restore a condition of near slavery over blacks in the South.  The Lost Cause Myth was developed and glorified in the late 19th and early 20th Century.  In spite of the post World War Two Civil Rights movement, people with a Confederate mindset have never given up.

This movement is crude and really only has as its central points a hatred of everyone who isn't lily white and a sense that "liberty" means whatever they say it means.  This group also intermixes with the NAR but it also includes members of other Protestant denominations, often in sort of a ignorant fashion.  The American Civil Religion is strongly represented, in which a person can conceive of themselves as a decent person as long as they're not having gay sex.

Groups like the Wyoming Freedom Caucus have a large element of Confederates in them.  Generally they're better defined by what they hate, than what they actually support.

This group's spark was ignited by two things, one being the election of Barack Obama and the other being the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.  I didn't vote for President Obama.  I voted third party.  But I did mistakenly see Obama's election as the sign that the country had made it past its racist past.  It hasn't,  It sparked a renewal of it by those shocked that the country would elect a black man.

I thought and still think that Obergefell was a horrible decision, devoid of legal support, and demonstrating a complete lack of the understanding of the history of marriage and natural law.   Obergefell was the wake up call for National Conservatives and the NAR as well.  But with this group it was more primitive.  National Conservatives basically have the view I just stated as well as a belief that its contrary to Christian beliefs.  The NAR believes the latter as well.  But most Confederates really don't care who you fuck, as long as they're of the opposite sex.

Trump is their man as well, as he's the NAR's man, and because he speaks well of them.  Profound ignorance of history, religion, and culture tend to dominate in this group, and always have.  That makes them easy to command. . . up until a  point.

The line of departure for many of them is when things become really personal.  If they're hurt economically, or if Trump policies hurt locally, they start to awaken.

• Opportunists, the ambitious, and cowards.

Sen. Dr. John Barrasso, who probably doesn't believe most of the crap he's shoveling.

This may seem like a summary of three groups, but it's basically one.

The GOP right now is packed with politicians and figures who have no love for Trump at all, aren't National Conservatives, and who haven't darkened a church door in years.  But they'll express undying loyalty to Trump. 

They don't mean it.

The problem with the political class is that many of them are hyper ambitious, some are lazy, and others are outright cowards.  Many of them combine all three of those characteristics.   Their primary motivation is just to keep their job.

Lots of currently serving Republicans expressed disdain for Trump before it became imprudent to do so.  J. D. Vance is one of them, so is Marco Rubio.  Chances are that neither of them have actually changed their views one bit.  Lindsey Graham sacrificed his dignity by become a Trump apologist, and didn't live long to restore his reputation.  All of these figures profited politically by supporting Trump.

Indeed, the entire current Wyoming Congressional delegation fits this category.  John Barrasso has mastered the art of never giving you a clue of what he's thinking at any one time, so he didn't have to live any statements down, but to people who are close to him, it's well known that he doesn't agree with what's going on even as he acts as the majority whip.  That makes him both ambitious and cowardly.  Cynthia Lummis was open about her disdain for Trump at one time.

And in the current political field, hoping that you fit into the Confederate or NAR groups, lots of local politicians are on the Trump bandwagon when you can strongly suspect that some don't actually support him at all.  Megan Degenfelder has her endorsement by Trump on her signs.  Steve Friess sends out endless flyers with his love for Trump, when what he probably really is would be much closer to Reagan's views, mixed in with some lingering Confederatism.  Reid Rasner, whose flyers have dried up, loudly proclaimed his undying loyalty to Trump while is gadfly reels have gone after Democrats but also the transgendered.  Rasner is a homosexual and there's no real good reason to believe that he believes what he's saying, or that he is what he proclaims to be in terms of his image (gun toten' horse likeing, Frontier type).

Which brings us to a real problem of the political class in general. As it can become a career, and as careerism itself means compromise, something needs to be done to keep it from being a career.

• The besotted and the ignorant.

Finally, some of MAGA is made up of people who are just amazingly ignorant or completely besotted by Trump, the latter of which is completely creepy.

The ignorant are pretty strongly represented in the rank and file MAGAs.  They are extremely poorly informed and believe that Trump is in their camp as he says he is.  Frequently there's something they know they like, or they know that they hate, and based their decision on something very narrow.  Because of very strong prejudices, wants or the like, they're willing to go along with everything else.  They don't really think anything through.  I have friends I see in sporting goods stores who fit this definition.  As long as the Second Amendment is protecting firearms, which in spite of the way they may see is a strong hobby interest for them, they don't care about anything else whatsoever.

And then there's the besotted, the most pathetic of all of Trump's supporters.  They love him because they love being in love with him. He's their Frank Sinatra and they're his bobbysoxers.  He's their Elvis.  He's their Beetles.  They don't look at anything else, as they don't want to.  They don't want to know about Sinatra's personal life or connections with mobsters, they don't want to remember Elvis as sweaty and fat, and they don't want Yoko Ono coming in and messing things up.  They love him, and they always will.

Which says more about them, than him.

Some of these people have, I think, an odd deficit to their lives and this is what they fill it with.  Chuck Gray seems to fill it with Trump and hatred, for example.  Looking at his life, it seems as if there's a big gaping hole he's trying to fill.  Only child of a divorced couple, spends summer in Wyoming, etc.  Anyhow, if  Trump turns out not to be their beloved, they'll be crushed, so they'll go on imagining that he loves them as they need to..

The Cold Civil War and the uneasy alliances.

The US hasn't faced a crisis analogous to this, ever.  The closest we actually come is the English Civil War that was fought from 1642 to 1651, before we were a country, but still part of our overall history.  Indeed, the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 already expressed the tensions that would lead to that horrible event.  Post 1776, the only crisis that's semi analogous is the American Civil War, which has the distinct difference of the pro democracy forces being solidly in charge of the government, as opposed to what we're experiencing now which is the opposite.  Still, lessons are there as well.

The English Civil War saw what we could regard as populist religious zealots seizing control of the government and struggling against the forces of tradition and true conservatism.  The war isn't commonly fully portrayed that way, but it's a fair way to look at it.  Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan religious zealot whose views did not represent the majority of Englishmen.  He succeeded in deposing King Charles and installing himself as Lord Protector over a theocracy so extreme that to this day the location of his head is kept secret.  As hated as he came to be, Mike Johnson, the Huckabees, and Pete Hegseth would all recognize the man as a kindred spirt.

It didn't last, however.  The monarchy was restored in 1660, along with football on Sundays, and the like.  In a lot of ways, while the Parliamentary forces won the Civil War, the harshness of the following regime resulted in an appreciation of what the Puritans were not, and that set the country, including the country's colonies, on to what they later became.  Not only that, but the Puritan figures who were still living were hunted down by restored monarchy.

In the American example, which is different for the reasons noted above, the wrongdoers really weren't hunted down, which preserved the evil we're confronting today.  If the English Civil War suggests that people won't endlessly endure a regime like Mike Johnson wants to install, the American Civil War suggests that after this is over, the perpetrators of an assault on democracy should be marginalized beyond the point of return.

And one final thing.  An attempted revolution with two completely separate sets of goals is unlikely to succeed long term.  The Dineens, Roberts, Drehers and Vances are not going to be able to make common cause with the Johnsons and Hegseths.  And that may be MAGA's Achilles heel.

Johnson, Lee, Hegseth and the like are just as much religious zealots of minoritarian sects as Oliver Cromwell was.  If they get within reach of their goal, they'll begin to enact laws accordingly.  MAGA members of the American Civil Religion will be fine with reversing Obergefell, but they really won't be keen on reversing Griswold v. Connecticut, something already being discussed in right wing circles, let alone Eisenstadt v. Baird.  Defining citizenship by a person's whiteness might be okay with far right populists who regard the country as Puritan, but it's not going to be with people whose predecessors came from Galway, Lebanon, or who founded Santa Fe.  MAGA, at the end of the day, is a ragged tent in which numerous small factions are gathered under the banner of Trump to either use him or be besotted by him.  He won't last forever.

But he'll try to, which makes from now until January extremely dangerous.

Labels: 1870s, 1877, 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, 2028 Election, 2032, Catholic, Christian Nationalism, Christianity, Curragh Mutiny, homosexuality, Orthodox, Protestant, Reconstruction, religion, Viktor Orbán, Wyoming Freedom Caucus,1640s, 1642, 1650s, 1651, 25th Amendment Watch List, Chuck Gray, Civil War, French Revolution, Kevin Roberts, Moses, Patrick Dineen, Puritans, Rod Dreher, Roman Empire, Stuart Restoration, The Lost Cause, The Madness of King Donald

What's wrong with Russia? It was never part of Rome.

By Ssolbergj - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2992630

SPQR Senātus Populus que Rōmānus.Translated, the Senate and People of Rome.  The motto of the Roman Empire, whose legions marched under that banner in service of its Emperors.

"I will burn other people's villages with a cheerful smile."

"It ain’t a war crime if you had fun."

"Behind us, there is a house on fire. Well, let it burn. One more, one less."

Russian wall scribbling in liberated Ukrainian territory.

What's wrong with Russia?

People have been asking that question for years, maybe centuries.

Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. 

Winston Churchill

No, it's really not.

What it is, is something it isn't.  It was never part of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire was the most extensive expression of the Greco-Roman world and their culture.  The Greeks had commenced the work that Rome would end up finishing, or rather the Catholic Church would end up finishing, well prior to Rome's rise, however.  The great Greek philosophers came into being prior to even the expansion of the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, infusing its culture with the outlook of the Western world.  Under Alexander the Greeks spread throughout the Mediterranean region, but the Romans picked it up, and the Greek world view, and massively expanded it.

Indeed, the influence of the Greeks and the Romans was so extensive that a student of early Christianity can't help but be impressed by the extent to which Christ and his disciples lived in a Judea that had been heavily impacted by the Greeks. The version of the Old Testament that is quoted in the New Testament pretty clear is the Septuagint, the Greek version.  Most, maybe all, of the New Testament was originally written in Greek.  Thoughts expressed in the New Testament are such that there have been those who have speculated that they could not have been expressed in Hebrew, had Hebrew remained the language of the Israelites, and that therefore Divine Providence was at work.  Early Christian Church fathers applied Greek philosophy to their understanding of Theology.¹ 

The Romans built on what they obtained from the Greeks, and they built the concept of a multicultural empire.  Rome started off a city state monarchy but in the end, it was a multicultural empire in which anyone within it could become a Roman citizen under certain circumstances.  Its unifying features was a uniform legal code and two languages, Latin and Greek.  You could be a cultural German, but if you could learn Latin and adhere to Rome's legal code, you had a chance to be as Roman as an Italian born in Rome.

The Church, and there was only one, came in and added the concept that there was only one moral code for everyone in the world, and your status and culture didn't trump that.  It also came in with a strong ethos of support for the plight of the poor and the equality of everyone before God.  Real women's rights came in with the Church, and the end of slavery was made inevitable by it as well.  The supremacy in religious matters of the Roman pontiff pointed out that even the government was subject to the Natural Law, and that it didn't create it.

We are all Romans.

The influence of Rome spread well beyond the Empire, even during the Roman age, and that was through Christianity.  Rome made it all the way up to the Teutoburg, but not beyond that.  Christianity did, however.  It may have taken the Northern Crusades to bring the Poles in, but brave missionaries to bring in the Scandinavians, but they did.

In the East, the Baltic was part of the Greek world, and hence the Roman world.  St. Andrew the apostle travelled into what is the southern Ukraine, via the Black Sea, and preached at least in Scythia.  Some maintain that he saild the Dneiper and preached in Kyiv.

Ukraine was the subject of missionary work in the 800s.  St. Cyril and Methodius, brothers, passed through Ukraine during their missionary work.  Western Ukraine, which is where the Ukrainian Catholic Church has its presence today, was Christianized first.

St. Cyril and Methodius.

Under St. Vladimir The Great, a Kyivan king claimed by both the Ukrainians and the Russians, the Kyivan Rus were firmly brought into the Church.   But of note, Vladimir had been born a pagan and converted to the Church (again, there was only one) in 988 after traveling to the West and studying the non-pagan religions. He died in 1015 at age 57.

Now, 1015 is a very late date.  St. Andrew had been in the region in 55AD.  St. Cyril and Methodius in the late 800s.  But as late as 988 paganism still existed in the lands of the Rus.

And in 1054, the Great Schism commenced.

Now, the Rus did take to Christianity, of that there can be no doubt. But the Great Schism put their Church outside the Latin world to some degree.  Islam was already on the rise, and the Byzantine Empire would fall in 1453.  In 1448 the Russian Church obtained de facto independence, although in 1439 history nearly took a different course with Russian Orthodox representatives recognized Rome as the head of the Church at the Council of Florence. Sadly, their union was prevented from taking effect.

So basically, the Russians were on the edge of the world. The Great Schism, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and then the collapse of the Byzantine kept them there.  Ukraine had been part of the Greco-Roman world, and to some degree, it remains so, especially the further west in Ukraine you go.

And this matters.

Outside of the Moscow elite and a very small urban elite, Russia is one great big blue-collar country.

Fiona Hill

Russia definitely has a cultured development and the Russians are a great people. But they're a people where western concepts have never taken root, including the concept that power devolves from the people, and not the other way around. Even those who have attempted, and there have been many, to change that, have uniformly failed.

It's a culture that has developed great works of art and literature, while remaining insular and focused on itself.  Outside of Russia, everyone is some sort of odd stranger, and the Russians have, from time to time, imagined themselves as the archetype of Slavs.  The culture has a hard time not accepting that to some degree.

And it's a rough place to live in part because of this.  People die young, often due to conditions and alcoholism.  Male deaths outstrip women's by quite some margin.² Brutality and acceptance of horrible conditions exists where it has departed elsewhere.  Russia's military retains an ethos of cruelty that stems back to ancient times and manifests itself in horrific ancient behaviors. 

And hence, there's really no mystery.  

Russia wasn't part of the Greco-Roman world.

Ukraine, however, was.

Footnotes.

1. There's a common myth that Islam preserved the works of the Greek philosophers, and Christians got them from them.

In reality, Islam got the texts of the Greek philosophers from Chaldean Christians, who had preserved them.  Latin Christians did get them from Islamic Arabs, but it is important to note that Islamic Arabs got them from Chaldean Christians.  

As it happened, Hellenized Islamist theologians were later dismissed and regarded as heretical in Islam.

2.  As an odd expression of this, it's often frequently noted that younger Russian women are disproportionately beautiful, before age and conditions change this at a rate not experienced in the West.   It's been seriously suggested that this is due to natural selection, as the population of women always exceeds that of men, thereby giving physically attractive women a heightened competitive genetic advantage.

A couple of interesting items. . .

 to ponder.

View from the S H Knight (geology) Building in 1986.

Recent research has indicated that humans reached the Faeroe Islands at least 300 years prior to the Vikings doing so.

This doesn't surprise me a bit, and apparently it's been more or less known for some time, and its what I would have expected, but new studies, involving obtaining DNA from the bottom of a lake, has proven it conclusively.

Evidence of really old sheep defecation was found down there.  Maybe sort of gross sounding in a way, but really cool nonetheless.  So not only was early colonization much earlier than guessed at, but it was true colonization.  I.e, we know about this place and we're bringing our sheep.

Really cool, in my opinion, is that part of the groundbreaking research was done by Dr. Lorelei Curtin of the University of Wyoming. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the university's Department of Geology and Geophysics, of which I'm a graduate.

She specializes, I'd note, in climate research and another study just out notes that global cooling seems to be brought about by global warming. Something I was taught when a student in that department some 35 or so years ago.

Graduates of the other department that I'm a graduate of, the College of Law, have not pegged me out on the pride meter much as time has gone on, but the Department of Geology and Geophysics is different.

Well, go Pokes.

I'll note this as well. The Vikings first settled Iceland starting in 874 and Greenland around 980.  I'm guessing that the last date is correct, but I'll bet that somebody was on Iceland by 874. Rather obviously, the Vikings weren't great at recording who exactly was where they went, when they got there, as the Faeroe Island discovery more or less proves.

Greenland?

 The White House Retweeted

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 15h15 hours ago

Denmark is a very special country with incredible people, but based on Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s comments, that she would have no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland, I will be postponing our meeting scheduled in two weeks for another time....

43,699 replies19,488 retweets94,918 likes

Show this thread

What on earth?

There is a point at which the news becomes so surreal, you just can't quite grasp that something is really in the news.  The bizarre news on the President making sounds on purchasing Greenland is news of that type.  The New York Times, no friend of President Trump's headlined an article on this in this fashion:

Trump, Greenland, Denmark. Is This Real Life?

Or a Peter Sellers movie?

Whatever a person thinks of Trump, or the New York Times, the Times pretty much nailed it.  It feels sort of like something out of The Mouse That Roared, or something like that. It's really hard to grasp what's going on here and a person has to suspect its some sort of odd news cycle diversion.

The story started off with what seemed like a joke and then evolved into something that just seemed like innocent ignorance, combined with a discount of the original suggestion.  But now its escalated to cancelling a state visit with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, who made it plain that purchasing the Danish possession was not going to be discussed.  Trump has since referred to Frederiksen as "nasty".

The irony there is that while Frederiksen is a Danish Social Democrat, she's a populist conservative on the European scale.  As Prime Minister she's opposed liberal immigration into Denmark, supported confiscation of items from refugees, and supported banning the burka.  She's critical of globalism and has made open comments about Islam being a barrier to integration in Denmark in a way that no American politician would dare.

In other words, Trump and Frederiksen should get along fine.*

Instead, we now have the American populist President insulting the Danish populist Prime Minister over Greenland.

I'm quite certain that 100% of the leadership in the President's party, as well as probably 98% of the people who work in the Administration, have the same reaction. Greenland?

The United States isn't going to buy Greenland.  Denmark isn't going to "sell" Greenland.  Greenland is self administering and if it has a change of status of any type, and it could, it would become an independent nation, something that it more or less would like to do, and which with its independent status, it more or less nearly is.  In my view, that's what it should be, which is not to say that its really actively asking to be that.

The flag of Greenland

Moreover, there was never an era when the US was going to "buy" Greenland.  If the country ever had any interest in doing that, it would have been about the same time as we fought the War of 1812.

88% of the residents of Greenland are Inuit.  Culturally, that places Greenland a lot closer to northern Canada, which isn't purposing to annex it, than it does to the United States.  If Greenland, however, was to join a North American nation, it'd be Canada. . . not the United States.

Greenland has belonged, in one fashion or another, to Scandinavian countries since 986 when it was first settled by Norwegians and Icelanders.  At that time, all Scandinavians, while not unified in rule, were close in culture and the distinction between a Norwegian, Swede or Dane was more theoretical than real.   Hitting Greenland during the Medieval Climatic Optimum, Scandinavians successfully colonized the coastal areas and a Christian Scandinavian population lived there all the way into the 1400s.  At the same time Greenland was also inhabited by the Dorset Paleo Indian culture, which also disappeared from the region around 1500.

The 15th and 16th Centuries were not kind.

As the Dorsets declined the Thule came in. They're an Inuit people and they make up the vast majority of Greelanders today, as noted.  The Danes came back in as early as 1605 when they started a dedicated effort to relocate the Scandinavian communities of Greenland which they had never forgotten, unaware that those colonies had been abandoned.  Still, a 200 year long recollection that they had been there is impressive.

Denmark and Norway shared a joint monarchy during this period which dissolved in 1814.  Norway went into a sort of unhappy union with Sweden shortly thereafter, but it maintained a fair degree of independence until Norway formally left that union in the early 20th Century.  All the way until 1933 Norway, however claimed unoccupied areas of Greenland until that claim was extinguished in favor of Denmark that year.

The first real substantial contact with the United States came in World War Two, during which the U.S. occupied Greenland as Denmark was occupied by Germany.  Greenland basically became self administering during this period but the experience did open up what had been a highly isolated society due to the American presence.  It pushed for self administration after the war but did not achieve it until 1979, in part, and 2009, in full.

It's pulled out of the European Community, which shows how self governing it is.

After World War Two the United States did maintain a military presence in the form of Thule Air Force Base, which was opened in 1943 and is still in use.  The US actually offered to buy Greenland at that time, offering Denmark $100,000,000 in 1946.  As Greenland was much less independent than it is now, perhaps this is not surprising.  The US had actually pondering buying it once before, in 1867, when Congress put an end to the idea.

In 1867 and 1946, of course, the situation was much different than it is now, in 2019.  Greenland for all practical purposes is independent in everything but name.  Greenland has full internal autonomy but does not administer its own foreign affairs.  With the 2009 arrangement, however, granting fully sovereignty over resources to Greenland, it's assumed that independence is on the horizon.  Greenland still maintains a close association with Denmark, and Danes make up a significant portion of the 12% of the population that's not Thule, but the end of Danish rule is coming.

The beginning of American ownership is not and its a really odd thought that anyone bothered to ask the Danes to sell something that they basically are giving back to the people who live there.  The Danes have never shown any interest in giving up Greenland to another country and remarkably reestablished contact with Greenland after a 200 year absence in the first place.  They contested Norway's claim to an unoccupied portion of it. They've been very clear in their views.

So what brought this about is really a mystery.  To Americans, it's probably just one more distraction, but if you are Greenlandic or Danish, it's no doubt insulting.  And now the insult for the Danes has been compounded.  And for what reason?

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*Which may be trivializing the seriousness of her views.  She's also a strong opponent of legal prostitution in Scandinavia.  Frederiksen is Prime Minister, it should be noted, as head of a minority party in coalition with parties of the left.