Author: Grumpy
John Ʌ Konrad V
@johnkonrad
NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets. The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural. Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them.
That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble.
The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon. American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe.
We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life. Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake. Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs.
We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating. So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy. And it worked. The Wall came down. But here’s what no one accounted for.
When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs. And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle.
An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas. And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized. So the arrogance takes root.
And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening. Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude. Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated. Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass. Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar. Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity. What Europe has is culture.
The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle. For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked. Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments.
At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.” We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more… like your conquering armies did for centuries. Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit.
You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators. What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization. It isn’t.
Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine. That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report. Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us” Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.
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Cool!
This is better than the Lego Movie.😂
Iran pilot rescue. pic.twitter.com/90kDp2Xlz1
— Grummz (@Grummz) April 7, 2026
A German Jaeger officer recalled of the British at Le Cateau:
They were wily soldiers, tough and tenacious fellows, with iron nerves, even when wounded. They shot well and understood how to use terrain with such skill that it was difficult even for Jaeger to detect them.
On April 2, 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing installation commanders to respect the Second Amendment rights of our service members on United States Military installations. Hegseth noted the Constitution is there to protect the rights of all Americans, including the rights of service members, which are protected by the Second Amendment.
The current policies in place in the United States military made it virtually impossible for service members to be able to carry arms for their own protection unless they were military police or in some training exercises.
Installation commanders have had the authority to determine who may carry weapons on their installations. Secretary Hegseth directed installation commanders to start with the presumption that a request by a service member to carry a personal weapon for personal protection is valid.
“The memo I am signing today directs installation commanders to allow a request for personal protection to carry a privately owned firearm with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection.”
Hegseth continued, “If a request is for some reason denied, the reason for that denial will be in writing and will explain in detail the basis for that direction.”
Military bases have been, in effect, gun free zones, where only a very few people, mostly military police, were allowed to be armed. Secretary Hegseth noted recent mass public shooting attacks on military bases at Fort Stewart, Holloman Air Force Base, and Pensacola Naval Air Station.
Online commentary from declared veterans on X was often positive, with comments such as “best Secretary of War ever” and “this should have been done long ago”. Detractors claim there will be a wave of accidental shootings, murders, and suicides as the policy is implemented.
War fighters will be required to follow the laws of the states where they are stationed. 29 states do not currently require a permit to carry handguns, concealed or openly. 21 states require a permit to do so.
At present, only a few states allow concealed carry by persons under the age of 21. The memo applies to service members “…in their nonofficial duty capacity on DOW property within the United States.” The question of Second Amendment rights for 18, 19, and 20-year-olds is being adjudicated in the courts.
In 2015, Donald Trump promised a similar policy. In 2018, this correspondent explained how the policy was neutered by the military bureaucracy in an article entitled Defiance through Compliance.
The complex mechanisms set up in the military bureaucracy made it virtually impossible for the vast majority of service members to carry arms for the defense of self and others, except in an active war zone. All of the incentives were biased against commanders allowing their service members to be armed.
As Secretary of War Hegseth noted, our military bases in the United States can be targeted in asymmetric warfare. Casualties at a United States military base inside the United States could be higher than the minimal casualties that have occurred in operation Epic Fury abroad.
People who have obtained concealed carry permits have proved to be more law-abiding than police officers in the same jurisdictions. Military personnel who are willing to submit a request to their commanding officer in order to be able to carry personal arms for the defense of themselves and others are likely to exhibit the same level of responsibility.
Most mass public shootings take place where the attacker knows most people are not allowed to carry defensive weapons.
The memo from Secretary of War Hegseth is designed to remove military bases from that category. The memo directs commanders to assume the need to carry for protection is legitimate. The incentives should become biased toward the protection of the right to bear arms.
Future memos might include retired military members, veterans, or simply those with carry permits among those allowed to carry on military bases. Retired police officers have a mechanism to carry nationwide. An increase in armed defenders increases the odds that one or more will be available to defend against an attack.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
