R.J. Pestritto is right that the removal fight matters. If the president cannot fire executive subordinates, it becomes difficult to see how he can “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” But Pestritto also says near the end of his essay that removal is only a first step, and he cautions against merely substituting judicial power for administrative power. That’s the point I want to pull forward here: restoring presidential control over the executive branch alone does not cure an unconstitutional delegation and a fusion of powers. We need to address the fact that most of the administrative state has no constitutional warrant—and also that restoring such awesome power to the president absent greater reforms might in fact do more harm than good.

The Trump Administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn its decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which held that Congress could limit the president’s power to remove members of “independent regulatory commissions.” In that case it was the Federal Trade Commission, but the principle has been applied to others like the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and, biggest of all, the Federal Reserve.

Trump is asserting what has come to be called the unitary executive theory. Its proponents (let’s call them the unitarians) emphasize that the Constitution says that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.” It does not say “some executive power” or that executive power shall be vested in “a president and whomever else Congress chooses to vest it.” If the president is to meet his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” he needs to be able to hold his subordinates accountable.

Apart from a few Civil War-era anomalies, the president’s plenary removal power prevailed from the first Congress until 1887, when Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, which is usually seen as the first independent agency. Congress created many more of these, especially the “alphabet soup” agencies of the New Deal (the AAA, PWA, WPA, and CCC; just about any three-letter combination will yield a federal agency). After the Court sustained its independence in Humphrey’s Executor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management in 1937 called for an end to “a headless fourth branch of government, a haphazard deposit of irresponsible power. They do violence to the basic theory of the American Constitution that there should be three major branches of government and only three.” Unitarianism joined Trinitarianism in orthodox constitutionalism.

The Court should overrule Humphrey’s Executor and restore the unitary executive. But that’s not enough. The more important constitutional point is that Congress has no power to create these agencies in the first place. Even if under presidential control, they still violate the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principle. That was a point made by none other than the author of Humphrey’s Executor, Justice George Sutherland. As a senator in 1914, Sutherland said that Congress could not confer legislative and judicial powers upon the FTC, calling the act “utterly void.” Many other senators saw the same problem, as did many conscientious congressmen who considered the Interstate Commerce Commission. As James Madison put it in Federalist 47, “[T]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

More recently, administrative law professor Gary Lawson described the fusion of powers in the bureaucratic state:

Consider the typical enforcement activities of a typical federal agency, for example, of the Federal Trade Commission. The Commission promulgates substantive rules of conduct. The Commission then considers whether to authorize investigations into whether the Commission’s rules have been violated. If the Commission authorizes an investigation, the investigation is conducted by the Commission, which reports its findings to the Commission. If the Commission thinks that the Commission’s findings warrant an enforcement action, the Commission issues a complaint. The Commission’s complaint that a Commission rule has been violated is then prosecuted by the Commission and adjudicated by the Commission. This Commission adjudication can either take place before the full Commission or before a semi-autonomous Commission administrative law judge. If the Commission chooses to adjudicate before an administrative law judge rather than before the Commission and the decision is adverse to the Commission, the Commission can appeal to the Commission. If the Commission ultimately finds a violation, then, and only then, the affected private party can appeal to an Article III court. But the agency decision, even before the bona fide Article III tribunal, possesses a very strong presumption of correctness on matters of fact and of law.

In Humphrey’s Executor in 1935, however, Sutherland wrote the unanimous opinion that insulated the independent regulatory commissioners from presidential removal. He opined that the commission was not an executive agency under the president. Rather, it exercised what Sutherland now called “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers. It is hard to explain why Justice Sutherland saved the commission that Senator Sutherland had called “utterly void” 20 years earlier.

He has been accused of wanting to spite FDR and thwart his ability to control the new administrative state. Liberals in 1935 favored the unitary executive when the executive was one of theirs. Today they dread it because the executive is Donald Trump. Progressives cheered the growth of presidential power for decades, but when Richard Nixon became president they shrieked about “the imperial presidency.”

It may also be that Sutherland trusted the courts to keep the agencies within constitutional bounds. The Court, which Sutherland joined in 1922, did exactly this to the FTC in the 1920s, and threatened to do the same to the New Deal agencies in the 1930s. Ironically, Humphrey’s Executor, among other decisions, so enraged FDR that he concocted his plan to pack the Court in 1937. Congress became so alarmed at FDR’s assertion of executive power that it defeated not only the court-packing plan but also Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management’s proposal for a unitary executive.

The removal question (who controls these agencies) is much less important than the question of what these agencies do. They are making and enforcing laws that the federal government has no constitutional power to make, which is equally true of non-independent agencies like the Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services. And the answer is not to shift the same unconstitutional power from administrators to judges under the banner of “review” while leaving the bureaucratic regime intact.

Congressional delegation of legislative power is bad enough—but it’s worse when Congress delegates power it does not possess in the first place. The regulation of labor-management relations, for example, belongs to the states, but Congress usurped this power when it created the National Labor Relations Board. The Court’s acceptance of the NLRB in 1937 was the real turning point in the constitutional revolution of the New Deal.

Restoring the unitary executive should be the first step toward restoring constitutional limits to federal power. Ultimately, we must put the genie back into the bottle of enumerated powers.

The post Going Beyond “You’re Fired!” appeared first on The American Mind.

Approximately 10-15% of U.S. couples of reproductive age experience infertility. One response is to pursue in-vitro fertilization (IVF), which is fraught with many negative ethical and practical implications. Another way is to get to the root cause of infertility. Shouldn’t that be the MAHA way?

President Trump expanded access to IVF with his February 2025 Executive Order. In October, he lowered costs for IVF and other fertility treatments.

While IVF does indeed “create” more babies, it comes at a steep physical, emotional, and ethical cost for couples (for an in-depth discussion of these and other issues relating to IVF, please see my podcast episode with Emma Waters on Bioethics Babe). At its heart, IVF circumvents infertility by moving procreation outside the body. Instead of healing the underlying causes that prevent conception, IVF bypasses them entirely. Eggs are harvested from the woman, sperm is collected from a man and introduced in a petri dish, and multiple embryos are created. A few are transferred to the womb; others are frozen indefinitely, discarded, or used for research.

The first concern is the loss of human life inherent to the IVF process. Each embryo created is a unique human being with her or her own genetic code. Yet only a fraction will ever be implanted or born. Some will not survive the freezing and thawing process; others will be implanted and die; still others will be discarded, used for research, left indefinitely in a frozen state, or made (horrifically) into jewelry. When we reduce human beginnings to surplus inventory, we risk dulling our sense of the intrinsic value of every human life. Those who do make it to live birth may at some point in their lives have to deal with survivor guilt or agonize over what to do with their frozen siblings.

The second concern is the toll on women’s bodies. To stimulate the ovaries into producing multiple eggs, women undergo daily hormone injections and procedures that can cause severe bloating, pain, and in rare cases, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome—a potentially life-threatening condition. The physical and emotional strain of repeated cycles, coupled with success rates that often hover below 30% per attempt, can lead to debt, disappointment, and heartbreak.

Beyond individual risks lie broader cultural questions. IVF and related technologies have opened the door to practices once confined to science fiction: embryo selection based on sex, perceived health, or other eugenic considerations, and genetic screening for preferred traits. When reproductive technology becomes a market, our understanding of the child shifts from gift to product—a result purchased through technical control rather than conceived in the intimate act of marital love. This is not a step forward for human dignity.

The U.S. fertility industry, now worth billions, remains highly unregulated. There are no federal limits on how many embryos may be created or how long they can be frozen. Success is measured in live-birth statistics, not in ethical terms. An honest public conversation about IVF must include oversight and transparency.

There is another way, and it will truly make America healthy again. It’s called Restorative Reproductive Medicine. As its name indicates, it is an approach that diagnoses and treats the underlying causes of infertility to restore fertility wherever possible. Why put a bandaid on infertility if we can help couples heal the root causes? Restorative Reproductive Medicine has shown success rates comparable to or better than IVF, without destroying embryos or putting extra risks on the mother’s health. Rather than bypassing the body, restorative care works with it, actually improving overall health and fertility.

Infertility is caused by a number of issues, so the restorative approach involves first identifying the origin of the infertility—whether it rests with the woman, the man, or a combination of them both. If (for example) it turns out the cause is hormone levels that are out of optimal range, the approach is supplementation.  If a woman has endometriosis, she may require an excision surgery that completely removes endometrial growths and scar tissue. More often than not, when the underlying health conditions are addressed, the couple can go on to have children naturally.

 It’s a model that honors a couple’s beautiful desire for children, restores their body to health, and respects the dignity of human life in how they are created.

The longing for a child is deeply human and good. Those who walk the path of infertility deserve empathy and support on their journey. We are also in a time of rapidly declining birth rates worldwide, so as a society we would do well to have more children—but not at any cost.

Children are not owed to any of us; they are blessings. A good desired end (a child) doesn’t justify morally fraught means such as IVF. And the good news is that restorative care helps many couples become parents through each other as God and nature intended, and not in a petri dish that takes the unitive and procreative act out of the equation. We should not rush to normalize conception by laboratory.

We can achieve President Trump’s dream of “many more beautiful American children” in a way that both respects human life and actually gets to the root cause of disease in infertile couples. The way forward is to invest in treating the root cause of infertility and thus also making Americans healthy again, which will benefit them all around, even outside of the fertility context.

Despite these concerns about the expansion of IVF, the silver lining from President Trump’s order is that employers can choose to offer Restorative Reproductive Medicine as a healthcare benefit for their employees instead. We should look to this as the way forward.

The post An Ethical Alternative to IVF appeared first on The American Mind.

When Donald Trump addressed the World Economic Forum last week, he was draped in the tricolor semiotics of American mythology: a bright red tie blazing against a navy suit and a brilliant white shirt, the azure backdrop proclaiming “World Economic Forum” in relentless repetition.

“We are the hottest country in the world,” he declared, as actual temperatures prepared to plummet toward record lows. Yet this apparent contradiction reveals not cynicism but rather a profound understanding of politics and human nature. Trump operates in the order of symbolic truth, where the sign serves not to deceive but to reveal deeper patterns of meaning.

His appearance in Switzerland, swimming in the red, white, and blue of the American flag while surrounded by the gray neutrality of European technocracy, was no accident. It was rather a deliberate act of semiotic resistance, a refusal to surrender national identity to the homogenizing forces of globalist abstraction. Trump understands intuitively what others labor to learn: that in an age of mass communication, the skillful deployment of signs can restore meaning to a world threatened by semantic collapse. His color palette functioned as a vital reminder that symbols still possess power, that representation can serve truth rather than obscure it.

Trump’s brilliance lies in his mastery of semiotic confrontation, the ability to manipulate signs to liberate rather than manipulate consciousness. Consider his campaign trail theatrics. At McDonald’s, adorned with the golden arches’ apron, Trump still wore a shirt and tie beneath. Sitting in the cab of a garbage truck, Trump sported the municipal worker’s vest over his customary business attire. These are not cynical photo opportunities but rather sophisticated acts of cultural translation that bridge the seemingly unbridgeable divide between elite and populist semiotics.

What emerges is an authentic synthesis of noblesse oblige fused with genuine populist connection, a reconciliation of contradictory class signifiers that reflects the complexity of American identity itself. The suit signals achievement, ambition, the American dream realized; the apron and vest signal respect for work, acknowledgment of service, solidarity with labor. Worn simultaneously, they create something genuinely new: the sign of a leader who refuses the false choice between solidarity and excellence, who demonstrates that one can honor both hierarchy and equality, and who proves that American success need not require abandoning American roots.

Trump’s authenticity derives from his refusal of pretense. He does not condescend to workers by pretending to be one; instead, he honors them by acknowledging both his difference in standing and his connection. This is transparency in the service of truth, semiotics deployed not to obscure reality but to illuminate it.

Consider the counterexample. Tim Walz, who appeared before cameras in a hoodie and camouflage hat to play video games during the run-up to the 2024 election, reveals the peril of semiotic incoherence. The hoodie is part of the trappings of urban youth culture; the camo hat invokes rural sporting traditions. These signs do not synthesize but clash. Walz’s campaign costume changes—t-shirts, flannel, the performative hunting expedition where he fumbled with his shotgun—revealed a man attempting to mirror his audience rather than lead it, to reflect rather than project, to follow the focus groups rather than trust his own symbolic integrity.

Trump, conversely, evokes what I have elsewhere argued is the archetypal American cowboy: the figure who mediates between civilization and wilderness, between order and freedom, and who brings justice through strength tempered by wisdom. Like the heroes of John Ford’s westerns, Trump embodies the necessary tension between competing American values.

While he channels the gangster’s aesthetic—the gilded maximalism reproduced in the Oval Office itself, all gold and grandeur—he transforms this signifier. Whereas Tony Montana’s opulence signified corruption and moral decay, Trump’s aesthetic announces the democratic right to success, the vindication of ambition, and the refusal of WASP austerity that once policed the boundaries of acceptable aspiration.

Here we approach the crucial innovation. Unlike the gangster narrative’s tragic arc, Trump has demonstrated that the American story need not end in inevitable decline. He exists not in perpetual limbo but in perpetual possibility, proving that narrative structure itself can be transcended through will and symbolic mastery. This may be his most profound contribution: the demonstration that we need not accept predetermined endings, that the script can be rewritten, that American optimism can triumph over European fatalism.

We may inhabit a world where most signs are detached from their referents. But Trump demonstrates something more hopeful—that skilled semioticians can reattach meaning to symbols and make signs serve human purposes once again. He produces images that acknowledge their constructed nature while simultaneously insisting on their genuine significance.

Trump’s is not the demagogue’s manipulation—the false sign pretending to spontaneous truth—but rather the showman’s honest performance that announces its own artistry while delivering authentic emotion and connection.

In this sense, Trump represents the possibility of postmodern politics with a human face. He understands that all communication is mediated by signs, but refuses to let that understanding descend into cynicism or nihilism. Trump is a symbol that remains tethered to the symbolized, a map that guides us toward the territory rather than replacing it, a simulation that points beyond itself toward genuine experience and real accomplishment.

We can celebrate this achievement and recognize that Trump has made explicit what democratic leadership has always required: that political power in the age of mass media must work skillfully with signs precisely to preserve authentic human connection, and that acknowledged performance can be more honest than claimed spontaneity.

The post Master of the Medium appeared first on The American Mind.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America was a vigorous, growing nation, coming of age in a new era of technological and industrial progress, with all the strains and stressors that develop under periods of mass movements and economic growth. Thousands of people flocked to the United States in search of opportunities. Despite domestic challenges and opposition from the wealthiest, Americans were able to rally in favor of reforms including antitrust legislation and increased food and workplace safety standards.

The Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts, two landmark laws from the era, form the cornerstone of the federal government’s enforcement of antitrust policy. Rapid industrialization after the Civil War allowed corporations in sectors such as railroads, oil, steel, and finance to consolidate market control, suppress competition, fix prices, and wield outsized influence over workers and politics. Farmers, small businesses, and labor organizations argued that these practices distorted markets and undermined democratic governance.

But since then, the usage of antitrust law has varied over the last century. In recent decades, federal regulators have gravitated more toward a “laissez-faire” view of antitrust enforcement. This hands-off approach puts the amorphous concept of the “market” at the core of the government’s concerns instead of taking more proactive measures to prevent unfair monopolies.

Decades of lax enforcement when it comes to mergers, combined with rampant offshoring and free trade, have resulted in a handful of large players dominating a wide range of industries. This puts American workers, businesses, and entrepreneurs at a disadvantage.

In December 2025, More Perfect Union, a nonprofit journalism organization that reports through a “class lens,” released a video on the recent struggles of soybean farmers in Arkansas. They’ve not only been squeezed by tariffs, but also more fundamentally by corporate consolidation within the agriculture industry.

To be clear: farmers in America, particularly soybean farmers, have had to grit their teeth throughout our trade battles with China, simply because China was the largest buyer of U.S.-grown soybeans. These are fundamental pressures the agricultural industry will have to balance, an issue that isn’t easily fixable in a world of global competition.

Corporate consolidation, however, is another story. In the same way that the rampant globalization of the last 40 years has hollowed out American towns and manufacturing capability, so too has the relentless march of pro-merger economic philosophies permeated both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The same principle applies to other industries across the United States, even to outsourcing itself. Accruing profit—and maximizing shareholder value—has seemingly become the goal of all corporate decision-making, often at the expense of the communities from which they buy and sell products. This leads to decisions like offshoring labor costs to improve balance sheets or driving up the cost of equipment, goods, or services to report a higher margin. None of this was done with an eye toward how it affects the long-term health of a specific industry, much less the working class.

But American prosperity has never emerged from a small number of companies in the name of efficiency. It has always come from competition. It happens when businesses fight for customers, where workers can move between employers, and where innovation is necessary to survive. Healthy markets require many buyers, many sellers, and real alternatives. When competition is strong, prices stay lower, wages rise, and companies are forced to improve their products and services instead of simply extracting higher profits. The conditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America were the opposite—and the early Progressive movement, the populists of their time, sought to change that, for better or worse.

Nowadays corporate consolidation is often defended as being more efficient, but efficiency for shareholders is not the same as efficiency for the economy. Many of the cost savings promised by mergers do not come from better products or smarter production. They come from suppressing wages, squeezing suppliers, and eliminating competitors. When workers have fewer employers to choose from, their bargaining power disappears. When suppliers face only a handful of buyers, they are forced to accept worse terms. When competition fades, innovation slows. These decisions may improve earnings reports, but they weaken industries over time.

That does not mean every merger is bad. In some industries, particularly those tied to national security, energy, or medical supply, consolidation may help bring production back to the United States or stabilize supply chains that have proven fragile. This resilience matters if we expect American companies to both compete in the global marketplace and return production to our own shores. Where mergers are allowed, policymakers should ensure that multiple firms can still compete instead of placing the entire industry in the hands of one or two dominant players. When companies combine technology or logistics capabilities, the benefits should be shared across the market, not locked behind exclusive systems that shut out competitors.

The benefits of vertical integration can reduce some inefficiencies, but it also creates a new risk: the ability to block competitors from accessing essential inputs or infrastructure. In those cases, integration stops improving efficiency and starts undermining competition. Once those barriers are in place, they are difficult to undo.

Weak competition harms more than individual industries: it hollows out communities, leaving fewer employers and fewer opportunities for local businesses. It creates fragile supply chains that depend on a small number of firms, where a single failure can ripple across the economy. Prices rise not because costs increase, but because consumers and businesses have fewer choices. This shows up in higher grocery bills, fewer options for farmers and small businesses, and an economy increasingly focused on extracting value rather than building it.

Antitrust enforcement is not anti-business on its face; in fact, it is pro-market. A general policy of competition protects innovation for American entrepreneurs and makes small businesses more resilient. We need regulators to enforce antitrust rules. Anti-competitive mergers should be prevented, and if allowed, they should come with clear conditions against price hikes and supply manipulation, and fair access to critical infrastructure.

Antitrust enforcement in the United States must be measured above all else. One fair criticism of the Biden Administration’s Federal Trade Commission was that it sometimes pursued aggressive enforcement without making the strongest possible legal case. That risks court losses that ultimately reinforce consolidation rather than reverse it.

Conservatives, therefore, should not abandon antitrust enforcement. They should pursue it more carefully and more rigorously, ensuring that companies can invest and expand while preventing them from locking up markets and squeezing out competition.

America has faced this problem before. At the turn of the 20th century, the country chose competition over concentration and self-government in the economic sphere over private power. The antitrust laws were practical responses to an economy that had tilted too far toward consolidation. Reclaiming competition today does not require reinventing the system, nor is it about punishing success. It is about restoring balance to the economy so that workers, small businesses, and communities can compete and grow. If the American economy is to remain strong, it must remain competitive, and that requires the political will to act.

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The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

ICE Storm | The Roundtable Ep. 302

Close on the heels of Renée Good’s death, Minneapolis protestor Alex Pretti was killed in another altercation with ICE agents. Investigation into both incidents will hopefully make judgment easier in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion the situation looks grim. Losing ground on the media battlefield and in polls ahead of the midterms, Trump must consider the extent and nature of his mandate on immigration. This week, the guys take a hard look at the electoral reality and discuss what it means for the Right’s policy agenda. Plus: regulatory bloat (aka Hegel’s revenge) makes it hard to translate political will into meaningful action in the UK, while inclement weather and exploding trees (!) make for an eventful week in the U.S.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 302 appeared first on The American Mind.

Donald Trump says many things, some of which should be taken literally and some of which should not. When Trump first mentioned the idea of America acquiring Greenland in 2019, many European leaders assumed, or at least hoped, that this plan fell into the latter category. However, as the last few weeks have demonstrated, Trump is quite serious about America obtaining the largest non-continental island in the world. If accomplished, getting Greenland will likely be remembered as the beginning of Europe’s own century of humiliation, as the reality of its status as essentially a vassal of the U.S. becomes undeniable.

Trump’s Greenland plan has garnered opposition domestically as well. While no small part of this disagreement stems from people who would refuse to brush their teeth if Trump told them it was healthy, there are sincere policy disagreements over the issue, notably within the “realist and restraint” coalition that has opposed the failed foreign policy status quo. Sensible realists have put forward proposals that seek to avoid annexation or invasion while still securing American interests via “dollar diplomacy,” as Justin Logan and Sumantra Maitra recently argued in The National Interest.

Trump himself seems to be moving toward such an approach, as he announced on social media that a framework is being established with NATO to address his concerns. He told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that “we will be getting everything we want at no cost,” which would involve perpetual “total access.” This does not sound like annexation, though a perpetual lease like Guantanamo Bay is certainly better than nothing.

In contrast, comments from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte seem to imply that the deal to which Trump has referred only concerns increased NATO military engagement in the Arctic, and that negotiations will continue between the U.S., Greenland, and Denmark over the island’s future. When asked about Greenland’s sovereignty going forward, Rutte replied that the question had not come up in the meeting, which seems rather hard to believe.

Details of what this framework fully entails are sparse and speculative, and Trump has a track record of announcing deals that have failed to materialize such as the end of the war in Ukraine. Speculation includes U.S. bases being turned into sovereign U.S. territory, changes to a 1951 defense treaty that allows U.S. military bases in Greenland, or Greenland becoming independent and entering into a Compact of Free Association (COFA), similar to the U.S.’s arrangement with several Pacific islands. The framework could grant the United States the responsibility for Greenland’s defense while leaving the country to govern its internal affairs. There is also a realist case for using dollar diplomacy to secure Greenland as a de jure territory of the U.S.

In the classic BBC show Yes, Prime Minister, the lovable yet perpetually conniving cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby once remarked that “Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century, politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon.” It is on this timescale that one must consider the acquisition of Greenland. 

A core tenet of realism is the radically uncertain nature of the future. We cannot foresee with any certainty the capabilities of great powers in 100 years, or what the U.S.’s own power will look like either. This calls for the careful stewardship of strategic assets and vital geographic resources, whose potential usefulness may be needed in a century or more.

Yes, America can easily ensure Greenland’s security now. And Denmark is aligned with the U.S. However, it would be foolish to think that these realities will always be true.

A case in point is the current situation regarding the British-controlled Chagos Islands, which house a strategically important joint U.S.-U.K. military base at Diego Garcia. In a fit of ideological madness, the Labor government is seeking to hand over the islands to Mauritius. If the British leaders who appear to be obsessed with turning their country into Airstrip One can fall so far so fast, we must consider two questions: What is to stop Denmark or an independent Greenland from aligning with a rival power in the future? And what would happen if this occurs when the U.S. is in a period of relative weakness or decline?

A theorized COFA implies that such an association can be ended at any time. Look at how France’s former colonies in West Africa are showing them the door. What would stop a similar scenario from playing out between Greenland/Denmark and the U.S.?

The point is that there is uncertainty about America’s future power potential and its ability to secure Greenland in the absence of full sovereign control. If we do not want to look like the U.K. or Europe in 100 years, we must take prudent action today.

Acquiring Greenland is necessary not only to provide radar coverage of ICBMs when they are exoatmospheric, but it is also a vital point of control in the Arctic Circle and a crucial access point to the North American continent via the Northern Atlantic. None of this will likely change in the next few centuries. But America’s ability to indirectly control Greenland very well may.

As Logan and Maitra argue, dollar diplomacy is a powerful weapon in America’s arsenal. In fact, concerned Danes have argued that it is already being wielded by powerful American businessmen such as Trump ally Ronald Lauder of the Estée Lauder fortune. If Denmark won’t fork the island over, then buying out the inhabitants, or at least their elites (such as they are), is the most prudent option.

The best time for the U.S. to have acquired Greenland was at the end of World War II, when we were already in possession of the island following Denmark being overrun by the Nazis. Instead, when we offered to purchase the island, we gave the Danes the right of refusal, which they exercised (and then we provided them with today’s equivalent of billions of dollars in development aid anyway). There’s a clear historical precedent for America to have kept Greenland at that time. Great Britain forced the reestablished Kingdom of the Netherlands to hand over Cape Colony, which the U.K. had taken from the short-lived French-aligned Dutch state during the Napoleonic Wars, in the London Convention of 1814.

The past is the past, and the next best time to secure Greenland is now. We are fortunate that we can acquire Greenland with wads of cash rather than boatloads of Marines. Doing so will ensure that a vital, strategically important piece of real estate will be at much less risk of falling into hostile control in the decades ahead.

Prudent statesmanship requires not just considering our immediate security needs, but also the needs of our posterity. It is up to us to ensure that future generations will have the best shot to survive the dangerous and anarchic world we will bequeath to them. By peacefully obtaining Greenland, President Trump can establish an American legacy and stockpile an expanded inheritance for future generations of Americans.

The post A Realist Case for America’s Acquisition of Greenland appeared first on The American Mind.

What is unfolding in Minnesota cannot be understood without first confronting a difficult truth: some cultures arrive intact. They do not dissolve on contact with modern society, nor do they gently adapt—they replicate.

Somali society is organized around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract, nor is it civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only insofar as he serves the group. Protection, marriage, honor, silence, and punishment are governed by this code. Obligations flow inward, sanctions flow downward. The clan precedes the individual and outlives him.

This structure is pre-modern, but it is also anti-modern. It resists the very conditions that make liberal societies function: individual accountability, transparency, impersonal law, and trust beyond kin. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligation. Where it persists, institutions decay.

Industrial societies require a high culture that is transmitted through mass, state-run education, because only such a culture can sustain economic mobility, the bonds of social trust, and full political citizenship within a highly differentiated division of labor. Nationalism in this sense is not an irrational passion but the adjustment mechanism by which politics and culture come into alignment.

The clan code also explains something many observers prefer not to see: silence. Silence is enforcement. Those who break ranks are dealt with swiftly. Ostracism is severe and permanent. This clarifies why so few Somalis publicly condemn abuse, even when wrongdoing is obvious. To speak is to choose exile. To remain silent is to survive. In clan societies, loyalty is rewarded more reliably than honesty.

These dynamics are not unique to Minnesota. The same patterns appear wherever clan-based cultures are transplanted into advanced welfare states—Sweden, the Netherlands, and Britain. The logic is consistent. Extract what can be extracted, and when the host weakens, move on. This is adaptation in its purest form. But it is fundamentally incompatible with modern civic life, which depends on social trust rather than blood ties.

Edward Banfield called this phenomenon “amoral familism.” Loyalty inward, indifference outward. Where it dominates, corruption is not a deviation from the system. In truth, it is the system. Public institutions become spoils to be captured, law becomes negotiable, and accountability vanishes.

This failure wasn’t the result of chance, but of choice.

You Will Be Assimilated

In Who Are We? Samuel Huntington traced the foundations of the United States to a specific and demanding cultural inheritance: Anglo-Protestantism, which was rule-bound, future-oriented, and property-respecting. This culture generated habits of work, restraint, and institutional loyalty that made self-government possible. Assimilation was mandatory. Immigration was selective—often brutally so.

Crossing the Atlantic was arduous. The destination offered discomfort, not charity. Newcomers were expected to contribute immediately. They had to prove they could support themselves and burden no one. Family reunification required proof of means. This wasn’t cruelty but the recognition of reality. And it worked.

The Irish, Italians, Jews, and others did not indulge in their differences. They adapted slowly, painfully, and unevenly—but successfully—to the American way of life. Their old-world identities weren’t erased overnight, but they were subordinated to a common civic creed that demanded they speak the English language, work hard, and be loyal to our country’s civic institutions. America wasn’t built by preserving every outside culture—it was built by insisting that no foreign culture could remain sovereign.

That settlement began to fracture in the mid-20th century. Charles Taylor’s essay “The Politics of Recognition” supplied the moral vocabulary for the shift. Taylor argued that liberal societies must move beyond equal respect—treating individuals the same under the law—toward recognition, in which distinct cultural identities are publicly affirmed and preserved. Identity, in this view, is dialogical: who we are depends on how others recognize or misrecognize us. Misrecognition, Taylor argued, inflicts real psychological harm. From this followed the claim that a just society cannot be culturally blind, but must actively recognize and affirm the equal worth of distinct cultural identities.

In theory, this was meant to correct historical injustice. In practice, it redefined citizenship itself. Equality before the law was no longer sufficient. Difference demanded deference. Culture became a claim on the state rather than a private inheritance that individuals carried with them.

Huntington clearly identified the turning point: the rise of a cosmopolitan liberal elite that sought to redefine American identity from a coherent national culture into an open-ended social project. The melting pot gave way to the salad bowl, and unity was reframed as oppression. The “we” of the American people was weakened, then stripped of substance, and finally treated as suspect.

This shift carried romantic assumptions. Pre-modern cultures were recast as pure, victimized, and enriching, a modern revival of the noble savage myth. Internal failures were ignored, and illiberal practices were excused. To criticize was to betray. Tolerance slid into indulgence, and indulgence into surrender.

Will Kymlicka then provided the intellectual scaffolding. In Multicultural Citizenship, he argued that justice sometimes requires group-differentiated rights because individuals need a stable “societal culture” as the background condition for meaningful autonomy. He distinguished between “external protections” that shield minority groups from domination by the majority and “internal restrictions” imposed by groups on their own members, which liberalism must reject. But this framework contains a fatal omission. Once assimilation itself is treated as illegitimate, no coherent mechanism remains for protecting individuals trapped inside illiberal minority cultures. The group is shielded from the majority, while the individual is abandoned within the group.

Minnesota is living with the consequences.

The West and the Rest

This brings us to the convergence now visible: Somali clan structures, Muslim Brotherhood-linked institutions, and the Democratic Party. Multiculturalism made this alliance possible.

Consider the redistributive state. Multiculturalism doesn’t merely tolerate difference—it funds it. The assumption is permanence without assimilation. The assimilationist assumes that individuals fend for themselves. The multiculturalist insists the state will compensate indefinitely. Welfare ceases to be a safety net and instead becomes a settlement mechanism.

Milton Friedman warned, with characteristic precision, that a country cannot simultaneously have a generous welfare state and open borders. One must give way. Minnesota chose neither.

Friedman was explicit that he opposed not immigration itself but immediate access to welfare. He even noted that illegal immigrants in a welfare state could work without drawing benefits. But open borders combined with unconditional welfare, he warned, distort incentives for migrants and host societies alike, and are fiscally and politically unsustainable.

My husband, Niall Ferguson, has spent decades documenting what made Western societies succeed. In Civilization, he formulated the “Six Killer Apps” that supply the West’s vitality: competition, science, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society, and a work ethic rooted in Protestant culture. These were, and remain, functional requirements. His central warning was that electoral democracy is the capstone of this structure, not its foundation, and that overexpansive states and proliferating legalism—the rule of lawyers rather than law—can corrode the norms of trust and legality on which prosperity depends.

Such pressures are usually diffuse, but Minnesota concentrated them.

The scale of the Minnesota story matters—not in vague terms, but in hard sums. The Feeding Our Future case alone involves roughly a quarter-billion dollars in alleged theft from a child nutrition program. That is the “respectable” number, the one no one can deny. But it is only the first layer of the problem.

Prosecutors and investigators have uncovered far larger losses across Minnesota-administered programs, figures that push well north of $9 billion. Further investigations are almost certain to uncover billions more. This isn’t petty corruption, nor is it the case of a few bad apples. It is corruption on an industrial scale—the kind that doesn’t occur without protection.

That is where the Muslim Brotherhood enters the picture, long described by analysts as gradualist rather than confrontational. It focuses on overtaking institutions first, language second, and law last. Its aim is not immediate domination but normalization, demographic leverage, and eventual capture.

Minnesota hosts a dense network of Islamic councils and advocacy groups dominated by Somali leadership. Nationally, the pattern is expanding. Each success is framed as inclusion, which is insulated from scrutiny by the language of civil rights. And each success advances a narrow, disciplined agenda that is deeply anti-modern.

The Democratic Party completes the triangle. Immigration shifted from policy to identity. Enforcement became immoral, and illegality was reframed as victimhood. The result is an unmistakable pattern of activists obstructing federal officers, officials retreating from their duties, and a party increasingly reliant on ethnic blocs it cannot discipline without alienating its base.

These three forces—clan loyalty, Islamist strategy, and progressive politics—aren’t identical, but they are aligned. All reject the assimilationist creed, and all benefit when the common culture dissolves.

Again, this wasn’t unforeseeable. Friedman, Gellner, and Huntington all warned us. Ferguson explained what made the West work. The knowledge existed, but what failed was judgment.

Multiculturalism sounds humane and feels enlightened. But it is neither.

A Cautionary Tale

Every successful subversive movement requires camouflage and cover. In Minnesota, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has functioned as both. Formally, it presents itself as a civil rights organization defending Muslim Americans against discrimination. In practice, it has helped recast any scrutiny of their networks, funding, and political behavior as evidence of prejudice. The move is procedural rather than rhetorical. Questions are not answered but reframed.

CAIR’s ideological lineage traces back to networks aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s own writings describe a project of normalization, demographic leverage, and institutional capture. CAIR’s role is to ensure that the process is never named. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s role has been to normalize it within the state.

As attorney general, he occupies one of the most powerful legal offices in Minnesota, with direct influence over what is pursued, what is delayed, and what quietly disappears. Under his tenure, scrutiny of Somali-linked fraud networks has been politically fraught. Investigations that would be routine elsewhere are treated as sensitive, even dangerous, terrain.

Ellison was raised Catholic and later converted to Islam as a young man. Conversion itself is not a crime, nor is it disqualifying. But in a political environment shaped by recognition politics, symbolism matters. One is permitted, even encouraged, to wonder what incentives operate when faith, identity, and power converge so neatly. When legal authority is exercised by figures embedded—culturally or politically—in the very constituencies under scrutiny, neutrality should no longer be assumed; it must be demonstrated. But in Minnesota, it has not been.

A democratic system cannot function when entire communities are treated as untouchable constituencies rather than equal citizens subject to the same law. When identity shields networks from enforcement, the rule of law gives way to selective indulgence. And once that line is crossed, corruption ceases to be an aberration and starts becoming a protected activity.

Each actor wants the same thing: numbers. For Democratic operatives, immigration has become an electoral strategy. For the Muslim Brotherhood, demographics precede influence. For clan structures, welfare extraction funds expansion and reinforces internal discipline.

What we are witnessing is the inversion of sovereignty. Authority migrates away from neutral institutions and toward organized blocs. Law becomes conditional. Citizenship becomes symbolic rather than substantive. At that point, the nation-state still exists on paper, but its essential functions—boundary enforcement, even-handed governance, shared duty—are already in retreat. What remains is administration without cohesion, elections without a demos, and rights severed from obligation.

By abandoning a common civic creed, Minnesota invited competing loyalties. By rejecting assimilation, it rewarded separatism. The result is a system that no longer knows what it is trying to produce. Citizenship becomes a label rather than a discipline. Belonging is decoupled from obligation. The state asks for nothing in return, and therefore receives nothing it can rely on. In such an environment, organized blocs predictably outperform individuals, and networks built on blood, faith, or grievance steadily replace rule-bound institutions.

The cure is not cosmetic reform but a return to first principles. Immigration must once again be selective, conditional, and unapologetic. Entry should be extended only to those willing to accept the host nation’s laws and culture without negotiation, and to do so in practice rather than rhetoric. There can be no automatic entitlement, no presumption of permanence, and no tolerance for systematic abuse. Residency and citizenship are privileges, not humanitarian vouchers. When they are treated otherwise, they lose all meaning.

The welfare state must also shrink—not out of spite, but out of necessity. Open access to benefits financed by others inverts selection. It attracts those best able to navigate and exploit bureaucratic systems rather than those prepared to contribute to them. The incentive structure is perverse, acting as a magnet for opportunism. When dependency is subsidized and independence is optional, dependency proliferates. No society can remain solvent—financially or morally—under those conditions.

Some may see Minnesota as a cautionary tale. It is, but it’s also more than that. It is evidence of what happens when high-trust societies encounter low-trust systems and fail to recognize the asymmetry between them.

The choice is clear: restore the equal application of authority, dismantle misaligned incentives, and reassert assimilation—or watch Minnesota multiply.

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The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Halfway to the Midterms | The Roundtable Ep. 301

As anti-ICE protests escalate in Minneapolis, agitators storm a church mid-service. But Trump’s deportation efforts are combining with economic pain to drive his poll numbers down. Uncertainty about Greenland doesn’t seem to be helping matters, though the breakdown of NATO may be unavoidable or already happening in all but name. With midterms looming, how should the administration approach this delicate moment? Plus: the discipline of classics, and with it the prestige institutions of the American academy, seem determined to self-destruct. Ryan, Mike, and Spencer survey the landscape and offer up a few cultural recommendations.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 301 appeared first on The American Mind.