Greetings and welcome to this rag and bone buffet of a 71st Carnival of Fools! We have a dog’s breakfast for you today. The world of politics — both domestic and international — feels like it has been on fire for the past week, and nothing has made me realize my inadequacy as a commentator more than my inability to say something intelligent about much of it, for simple fear of being overtaken by events. (Notably missing from today’s Carnival: anything about Iran.)
Instead, the shambolic cast of this threepenny opera is left to disgustedly pick over the remaindered mess of an entire week’s work of partially chewed leftovers. And yet we remain hungry as ever. So it is time — come, let us once again plunge our unprotected hands elbow-deep into the great garbage can of politics and sift for our sustenance.
Minneapolis Feels Like Dover Beach All Over Again
As the sun rose over the Twin Cities on Monday morning, it remained frozen but “mostly peaceful” in the wake of demonstrations over the shooting of anti-ICE activist Renee Good. And I exhaled with relief: We had passed through a potential weekend crucible without any major rioting or civil unrest. (The most obvious reason for this, as I have emphasized before: It is currently January in the Midwest.)
But what did we even witness in the first place? Recall that my initial reaction to the ICE encounter that led to Good’s death was to write off the entire state of Minnesota on prudential grounds — this is a state that has quite simply appeared in negative national headlines too frequently over the past five years to justify its continued existence. But that reaction was something of a dodge, because it was abundantly obvious to me at that moment that we would spend the next week arguing about each and every angle of the confrontation and shooting.
And we have. I cannot emphasize enough how lucky I feel to have sat nearly the entire thing out, precisely because the experience of watching people argue about the incident with such heat, hatred, and impossible certainty shook me. I wasn’t certain about nearly anything I saw, at least not at first. I waited until every video of the incident emerged, and I am still left with the queasy feeling that Good’s death, while transparently the fruit of a strategy of illegal and coordinated activist provocation, may have been unnecessary. (This is not the same as calling it criminal, or questioning the mission of ICE; the fact that so few accept this distinction as meaningful is one reason why I despair.)
The wild rhetorical war between partisans on both sides about what happened alone — fighting to “shape the discourse” in America’s online battle space — felt like melting back into the funhouse unreality of the late-stage 2024 presidential campaign, when every partisan was out for blood, up was down, and left was right (or vice-versa) as necessity commanded. Then as now, the commandments to disbelieve one’s lying eyes were always supplemented by immense bursts of seeming clairvoyance on both sides. “She was trying to run him over!” “He wasn’t in fear for his life!”
Unlike the rest of the internet’s commentators, I am not so gifted a reader of souls as to draw conclusions from a 30-second encounter. What I see instead is a “scissors statement” event: A moment almost purpose-designed to divide viewers by their partisan priors rather than their analytical instincts. And I have mine: My sympathy instinctively tends toward the ICE officer, dealing with yet another vacant-eyed, internet-primed activist blocking traffic, unaware of what a fraught situation she is interfering with.
I’ve seen the videos of Good insouciantly “waving” ICE traffic by (after having blocked passage for minutes), and my best guess is that she was goaded into attempting to drive away by her wife — who was outside the car filming the exchange for what she anticipated would be a later upload to social media. The wife, realizing that arrest might be imminent, shouted, “Drive, baby, drive!” at Good as Good hit the accelerator. Maybe they thought they would simply make their escape after having had their activist fun. I have no idea what the officer thought, having only his cellphone footage to go by, though I do not think that using the word “bitch” after such an instantaneous and fatal shooting means anything other than his adrenaline was up.
But there I go, attempting to read minds. And that is decidedly above my pay grade. I do know this much: There currently exists a vast swath of people on the activist left who either implicitly or explicitly deny the legal authority of ICE to exist and do what it does — out of ignorance, or, more often, simply because they believe it to be “unrighteous.” They remind me of nobody so much as “sovereign citizen” types. (Their arguments are of that caliber.) The problem is that there are exponentially more of them than there are sovereign citizens.
And when I see them violently rioting at ICE facilities and outright attacking officers — as we witnessed this weekend in Chicago — I find myself wondering what will quell the invincible ignorance and passionate fury of activists convinced emotionally, rather than rationally, of their righteousness. It puts me in mind of nobody so much as the 19th-century British poet Matthew Arnold, and his immortal poem “Dover Beach”:
We are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Donald Trump Will Have to Destroy NATO Before the U.S. Acquires Greenland — and He Might!
Donald Trump began last year — even before he officially took office — making noises about the United States’ need to annex Greenland. (Only grognards will recall at this late date, but the effort culminated in an abortive visit by Vice President JD Vance — originally announced as a “goodwill” trip by his wife Usha to the native Greenlander region of Nuuk, it was quickly reduced by the Danes to a tour of ultra-remote U.S.-leased Pituffik Space Base once Trump added Vance himself to the attendee list.)
For the rest of that year, American voters, distracted as America has forever been by approximately 99 other problems, decided that Greenland wasn’t one of them. But now, in the wake of Trump’s “success” in Venezuela — yesterday, Trump posted a Photoshop of a Wikipedia entry labeling him “Acting President” of the country, to give you a sense of how things are going — Trump has doubled down on his demands to acquire the island wholesale.
In interviews with the New York Times and on Air Force One, Trump has emphasized that he will not settle for the expansive basing and military rights we already have in Greenland: He demands a full-scale territorial acquisition, one that will add to his presidential legacy’s luster. At a press conference on Friday, Trump bluntly said: “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way, but if we do not do it the easy way, we’re gonna do it the hard way. By the way, I am a fan of Denmark. The fact they had a boat land there 500 years ago does not mean they own the land. We will be doing something with Greenland — the nice way, or the more difficult way.”
There is no way — either nice or difficult — that Trump will be able to acquire Greenland for the United States without destroying both NATO and our own nation’s self-understanding. This is about Trump’s voracious and thinly veiled need to mark himself in history as a man who “added to American land” — the sort of vulgarly acquisitive and pettily grasping mindset more worthy of a Muscovite tsar than an American president. Denmark and the collected nations of Europe are already skeptical enough about the future prospects of the postwar alliance, but nothing would kill it stone-dead more cleanly and instantly than stealing territory by force or at gunpoint.
The problem, of course, is that there seem to be some in the Trump administration who wish to see this precise thing happen.
And We Bid You Goodnight, Bobby Weir
Over on my National Review side gig (which ironically was for years my main gig here — what a long strange trip it’s been), the musical podcast Political Beats, we just ended the year on our Patreon channel with what we’ve taken to calling our “Funeral for a Friend” episode — a January farewell to greats in the world of music who passed the previous year. My co-host Scot Bertram has often pointed out to me that this is a feature of our podcast that will get only more and more painful to do in subsequent years, as the reaper inevitably comes. (For my own part, I choose to believe that Bob Dylan somehow fooled death and now is a step ahead of even him.)
And on our episode, I found time to mention one of my favorite bands from the rock era, the Grateful Dead. Of course, I was talking about recently departed Donna Jean Godchaux, whose vocals played a significant role in the band’s sound during her husband Keith’s 1971–79 tenure with the group. The year before that, on our 2024 episode, I lamented the loss of the Dead’s bassist Phil Lesh.
Little did I know that the very day we released our show, the last remaining voice of this, one of the most thoroughgoingly American bands of the modern era, would finally fall silent: On Sunday night, the Dead’s rhythm guitarist, co-lead singer, and founding member Bob Weir at last laid down his weary tune. Now is not the place for an extended obituary; in fact, I’m not sure I’m capable of one.
At the risk of scandalizing my readers, I am indeed a “Deadhead.” (You would be shocked at how many conservative-leaning fans the band has, precisely because they’re essentially nonpolitical.) That means I’ve been listening to their glorious and pure variety of Americana and psychedelia since I was 18 years old and have so many hours under my belt that briefly encompassing their importance — or Bobby’s contribution to it — is impossible.
Weir grew up with the Dead, co-founding the group as a 16-year-old space-cadet buddy of Jerry Garcia’s, and hanging on so tenuously during their early years that he was actually fired midway through 1968 for slacking on guitar. It didn’t take, mostly because all involved were too embarrassed to cut ties; in the meantime, Weir took it as a proper warning to shape up, and developed not only into a fine player, but the Dead’s secondary songwriter behind Garcia as well as one of their two primary vocalists. Weir wrote countless classics for the band — “Sugar Magnolia,” “Playing in the Band,” “One More Saturday Night” are merely the most well-known — but more than anything else, he was the warm, friendly voice of the group during almost all of their years, even when Jerry himself was flagging.
R.I.P. Bobby, and I can assure you that the music will never stop.
As for the rest of you — until next week.