Academic Freedom

The Rebel Realist: My Arctic and Realist Journeys Converge

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Culture, History, Liberty, Politics , , , ,

For decades, the high priests of the Arctic establishment—the tenured mandarins, the deep-state bureaucrats, and the military-industrial gatekeepers—have policed the intellectual boundaries of the Far North. Safely insulated within their sanitized consensus, they preach their cozy and self-serving sermon of Arctic orthodoxy, and shamelessly pivot en masss to whatever fad is currently in vogue.

They demand absolute obedience to a top-down, state-centric map where only sovereign nations possess the power to define, determine and /or dictate the world order. But this beautifully manufactured illusion is built on an historical lie, sustained by an obsolete political theory designed to protect their own policy monopolies: I refuse to bow to their secular priesthood. My work is an act of deliberate defiance against a rigid orthodoxy that seeks to silence alternative strategic thought and freeze the Arctic in a permanent state of intellectual stagnation.

Exposing the Danish Colonial Cover-Up

The mandarins derive their moral authority from protecting a status quo that carefully sanitizes the brutal reality of Arctic colonialism. Consider Denmark’s celebrated “benevolent” stewardship of Greenland. Beneath the polished veneer of Copenhagen’s diplomacy lies a dark legacy of structural violence and deliberate cover-ups that the establishment actively minimizes: 

They want us to forget the catastrophic G60 policy of the mid-century, which forcefully uprooted self-sufficient Inuit hunters from their ancestral villages and packed them into industrialized urban blocks, systematically crushing the traditional indigenous economy.

They cover for the horrific Spiral scandal, where thousands of Inuit women and young girls were subjected to involuntary demographic engineering and population suppression via forced IUD implantations. 

They minimize the ghost of Thule, where Denmark openly lied to its own parliament and the public to forcefully evict entire Inughuit communities from Pituffik within days, trading indigenous land for geopolitical leverage with Washington. 

They actively ignore the cruel cultural “Danishization” experiment, which tore Greenlandic children away from their families to strip them of their indigenous identity and mold them into an alienated, Danish-speaking elite, a policy of separation that refuses to go away entirely.

By pretending these structural atrocities are merely “past missteps” rather than the very foundation of modern Danish rule, the deep-state apparatus perpetuates an illegitimate occupation. 

When I write of American annexation, the Trump Doctrine, or Inuit liberation, I am not promoting imperialism; I am exposing the rotting scaffolding of an existing colonial framework that the gatekeepers desperately want to hide.

Western Arctic Encounters—Where the Orthodoxy Melted

To understand the raw mechanics of my defiance, one must look beyond pure political abstraction and see the real-world clash that shaped it. 

My Fourth Image Theory was not born in the sterile libraries of the Ivy League; it was forged through over a decade of blood, sweat, and ink living working alongside the indigenous peoples of the Western Arctic from 1989 to 2000.

When the deep-state mandarins draft their defense strategies, they look at the Arctic and see an empty, canvas of pervasive whiteness—a “barren frontier” waiting for state structures to bring order. 

My time in the Western Arctic completely dismantled that myth. I lived through the transformative era of Inuit Land Claims, embedded within communities like the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in as they systematically outmaneuvered the Canadian federal state.

I watched firsthand as local tribal councils used the ultimate weapon of modern asymmetry: structural litigation and unyielding constitutional pressure. I remember sitting in community halls where federal bureaucrats from Ottawa, loaded down with maps, tables, and top-down mandates, tried to dictate how the northern territories would be carved up. 

Prescient indigenous leaders didn’t blink. They didn’t ask for permission; they dictated their own terms, leveraged land-claims negotiations, and essentially forced a sovereign state to yield its monopoly over resource management and regional governance.

Stripping Power from the Bureaucrats

This was the exact moment my Fourth Image Theory and my framework of Constructive Realism crystallized for me. For generations, traditional International Relations theory has relied on Kenneth Waltz’s classic three images and their pyramidal hierarchy of power—the individual, the state, and the international system. 

This top-down trinity of power allows state bureaucrats to claim a monopoly on political analysis, asserting that if the state recedes, only chaos and anarchy remain.

My emancipatory Fourth Image restores the tribal and indigenous polity as a foundational, enduring layer of the fabric of world politics. It re-affirms that world order is actually anchored from the bottom up, driven by active creation rather than passive survival. 

Under Constructive Realism, threat perception is filtered through local histories and regional subsystems, transforming realism from a philosophy of enduring chaos into one where world order is actively negotiated.

When the artificial structures of the state fade, highly resilient, organized tribal polities endure, stripping the traditional bureaucrat of their authority. This framework completely bypasses the foreign policy middleman (aka “the blob”) entirely, recognizing that indigenous groups possess their own inherent, sovereign diplomatic power. 

True polar security is not found in the Pentagon’s distorted strategic maps or the placement of missile silos; it is rooted in local ecological co-management and tribal community resilience. The mandarins treat indigenous agency as a fragile ornament to be protected. My field research proved it is a hammer capable of breaking state hegemony.

NAADSN’s Nasty Response—The Anatomy of an Academic Hit-Job

Predictably, my refusal to mirror back the establishment’s self-serving narratives has triggered intense academic pushback. When I broke the ultimate taboo by publishing my essays on the “Trump Doctrine” and re-framing a potential U.S. acquisition of Greenland as the final decolonization of North America, the deep-state apparatus panicked. 

Organized networks of state-funded scholars mobilized immediately through the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network (NAADSN), releasing two highly coordinated, aggressive policy hits designed to isolate and delegitimize my theories: A January 19, 2026 Quick Impact piece provocatively titled: “Seeking to Legitimize American Conquest? A Response to Barry Scott Zellen.” And a February 17, 2026 Strategic Perspectives paper titled: “Justifying Annexation: Barry Scott Zellen and the United States’ Annexation of Greenland.” 

The exact text and framing of these NAADSN papers expose the precise gatekeeping mechanics of the academic elite. They did not engage with the historical reality of Danish colonial abuses. Instead, they explicitly attacked my work as an attempt to “justify annexation” and provide a pseudo-intellectual cover for “American conquest.” They weaponize terms like “imperialism” to shield Denmark from its own horrific colonial ledger, pretending that maintaining the Danish Crown’s grip on Greenland is somehow a victory for indigenous self-determination.

They claim I disregard local Inuit agency and the democratic will of Greenlandic leaders, while failing to see that true agency cannot exist under a lingering colonial shadow.  For instance, Greenland’s current Prime Minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said if forced to choose between the United States and Denmark, Greenland chooses to remain part of the Kingdom of Denmark. But this, I believe, is the exclusive view of elites in Nuuk who remain both psychologically and economically dependent on their colonizer. Greenland’s previous PM, Múte Bourup Egede, currently Foreign Minister, is more stridently pro-independence and thus more openly clashed with Copenhagen, famously stating: “We don’t want to be Danes. We don’t want to be Americans. We want to be Greenlanders.”

They feign alarm at my provocative analogies—such as looking at rapid U.S. military actions in places like Venezuela as potential strategic blueprints for Greenland’s liberation—labeling them dangerous and unreasonable because it forces them to confront the raw reality of great power politics. 

Furthermore, they condemn my challenges to America’s paranoid, anti-China polar policy as heresy because it disrupts their carefully constructed (and inherently false) binaries, ignoring my argument that isolating Russia or freezing out Chinese economic partnership only damages circumpolar unity.

The Verdict: We Are Not Going to Be Silenced

By doing so, the mandarins exposed their true objective: they are not interested in open academic debate. They are enforcement officers of a secular priesthood, fiercely guarding their policy monopolies, federal grants, and institutional funding by executing tactical “cancel culture” against any scholar who refuses to mirror back their comfortable illusions.

My response to their coordinated panic has been an uncompromising, 50,000-word three-part working paper titled Debating Arctic Security, where I systematically dissect their attempt to censor alternative strategic thought.

Moreover, I have bypassed their defensive, hand-wringing academic posturing altogether by engineering a novel geopolitical architecture for the future. In my exhaustive 25,000-plus word Proposed COFA Between the United States of America and Greenland, I outline a definitive roadmap to transition Nuuk out from the colonial shadow of Copenhagen. 

This blueprint leverages a free association model—granting Greenland absolute sovereignty and a seat at the United Nations, while integrating it under an American defense umbrella and guaranteeing exclusive polar basing rights to Washington. This is a realistic, enduring path to permanent Arctic autonomy that treats the Inuit not as passive victims, but as sovereign state-builders. Let NAADSN’s self-anointed elites scream from their state-funded ivory towers: every attack paper they publish, every defensive bureaucrat who panics at the rise of the Fourth Image, and every desperate attempt to minimize Denmark’s dark colonial history only proves my thesis. 

They are terrified because they know their top-down, state-centric illusions are melting under the heat of Constructive Realism—and a truly free, sovereign, and decolonized Arctic will inevitably emerge, indifferent to their deep-state designs.

Is persecution the purpose?

Nick Cowen Books, Current Events, Liberty , , , ,

takentobestoned

Last week, Rebecca Tuvel, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, had her recent article in Hypatia, ‘In Defence of Transracialism’, denounced in an open letter signed by several professional scholars (among others). They accused her of harming the transgender community by comparing them with the currently more marginalized identity of transracialism. William Rein, on this blog, and Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, have written valuable defences of Tuvel’s right to conduct academic research in this area even if some find it offensive.

Events have moved fast. The associate editors initially seemed to cave in to pressure and denounced the article they had only just published. The main editor, Sally Scholz, has since disagreed with the associate editors. Critically, Tuvel’s colleagues at Rhodes College have given her their support so it looks like the line for academic freedom might be holding in this case. Without wishing to engage too much in the hermeneutics of suspicion, I think there are grounds to doubt the depth of the critics’ attitudes. I base this on my reading of Judith Butler, who is one of the signatories to the open letter arguing for Tuvel’s article to be retracted.

Seven years ago, I managed to read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Although there are many variations in the movement, Butler is a central figure in the post-structuralist , non-gender-essentialist, feminism that inspires much of the contemporary ‘social justice’ movement. When I got past Butler’s famously difficult prose, I found a great deal of ideas I agreed with. I wrote up a brief piece comparing Butler’s concerns with violently enforced gender conformity to classical liberal approaches to personal autonomy. I also identified some problems.

First, Butler’s critique of the natural sciences seems to completely miss the mark. Butler associates gender essentialism with the study of genetics, when, in fact, genetics has done more than almost anything else to explore the contingency and variation of biological sexual expression in nature. The same applies to race and ethnicity.

Second, more importantly, Butler insists that there is no underlying authentic gender or sexual identity. All identities are ultimately constituted by power relations and juridical discourses. You find this argument repeated among social justice proponents who insist all forms of identity are products of ‘social construction’ rather than ever being based on natural facts. As a result, all personal identity claims are only ever historical and strategic. They are attempts to disrupt power relations in order to liberate and empower the subaltern and oppressed albeit temporarily

I don’t think this is perfectly factually true but lets accept it for now as roughly true. This means that transracialism itself might become, or could already be, another example of the strategic disruption of contemporary juridical discourses, this time about race and ethnicity. The same people currently denouncing Tuvel could very easily insist on the acknowledgement of transracial identity in five or ten years time, and denounce those who hold their current views. From their own position, which explicitly rejects any ultimate restrictions on identity formation, we have no warrant to know otherwise.

In this sense, Tuvel might not be ‘wrong’ at all, just slightly ahead of the social justice curve. And her critics wouldn’t actually be changing their minds, just changing their strategies. Meanwhile, people who actually take their identities seriously should be wary of their academic ‘allies’. They can quickly re-orientate their attitude such that a previously oppressed identity comes to be re-configured as an oppressive and exclusionary construct.

If all claims in this area are strategic, rather than factual, as Butler claims, then why try to damage a philosopher’s career over it? Why provoke an academic journal almost to self-destruct? Rather than working out which ideas to denounce, we should critique the strategy of denouncement (or calling out) itself. In that vein, much as I disagree wholly with the stance of its editorial board, I think calling into question Hypatia’s status as an academic journal, is premature.

A Hayekian View of Safe Spaces

Zachary Woodman Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

The concept of a “safe space” has dominated the discourse in identity politics for the last several years. Proponents of safe space, mostly left-leaning millennials are now demanding that colleges, schools, corporations, and various other institutions remove potentially offensive or triggering ideas or images that might harm minorities. Much of the time, this leads to hilariously captious nitpicking over things like Halloween costumes and ethnic food. Other times, it leads to what critics (mostly conservatives and libertarians) see as threats to free speech. It has led to violent reactions to opposing candidates, the ridiculous firing of college presidents, and censoring of speakers at universities.

Largely, the conservatives and libertarians are right. College and society as a whole are not and should not be “safe spaces.” Especially in education, one should be exposed to offensive, radically different ideas and world views. The reason free speech and academic freedom exists, as JS Mill argued in On Liberty, is because stifling freedom of expression robs humanity of potentially true ideas in the future. There is a similarity the merits of freedom of speech and entrepreneurship in the market; dissenters with public opinion are essentially ideological entrepreneurs who are discovering better vocabularies and better ways of thinking. If we stifle the free market, we are stuck with the same suboptimal products, services, technologies and methods of production; if we stifle free speech we risk being stuck with the same false ideas.

There is little I can say in defense of free speech on college campuses that hasn’t been said before. How coddling the youth leads to intellectual stagnation, or how tolerance is a two-way street and if we are to tolerate liberal point of views, we should tolerate bigotry. However, there are two points that are too often overlooked in the debate over safe spaces by the right wing critics.

First, the idea that the drive for safe spaces and censorship of ideas is solely a left-wing phenomenon is a complete and total myth. Conservatives like to fashion themselves as the “strong” defenders of free speech and inquiry, and the wimpy leftists as fascists seeking to protect their fragile little feelings. Beyond the fact that these are over-generalizations, it is a fact that conservatism is occasionally as much an enemy to free speech in trying to create “safe spaces” for people who agree with conservative, Christian values as the leftists are in trying to create safe spaces for minorities. I might have selection bias in that I recently left the ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, but there were many comical attempts there to censor ideas of those who disagreed with the college’s overwhelming conservatism; whether it was the administration’s banning of an LGBT group, students protesting a theatrical performance that included gay characters, or the students throwing a fit over the college using Starbucks because their CEO is a liberal. Look no further than some of the policies at colleges like Bob Jones, Patrick Henry, or Liberty University (my mother’s alma mater, for the record) where free speech is regularly suppressed to support conservative propaganda. Or the events which bear an uncanny resemblance to the recent incident at Claremont at William and Mary last decade.

As a further anecdote, I was a co-founder of the Gadfly Group at Hillsdale which sought to intellectually provoke Hillsdale students by promoting non-conservative political and philosophical viewpoints. One day, the president of the college (Dr. Larry Arnn) flat out told me and the group’s main founder that he didn’t think the group should or needed to exist on campus. While we were forming, at least according to Arnn, one of the deans had attempted to stop our approval by the administration (though, thankfully, the provost disagreed). After the group’s formation, though we had a number of popular events and many of the students were supportive of us, many students ridiculed us as “pseudo-intellectuals” engaging in “intellectual masturbation” (actual words said to me), calling us “angry libertarians” (even though I was the only libertarian in the group and we did events on people like Rawls), and some students were extremely offended by our presence and said the group should be banned. If that’s not evidence of right-wing censorship on college campuses, I don’t know what is. It’s enough that I’d consider writing a book in the spirit of Buckley entitled Ubermensch and Man at Hillsdale College.

Second, despite the problems with safe spaces when applied to macro level social institutions, freedom of association is consistent with a limited concept of safe spaces when applied to micro level social organizations. Though I detest their means, I do sympathize with many of the ends of these so-called “social justice warriors.” I am a liberal in the Rortian sense that I think cruelty is the worst thing you can do, and much of this attempt to create “safe spaces” is an attempt to what they perceive reduce cruelty to minority groups. Of course, they take it way too far in complaints about cultural appropriation which are not cruel to anyone, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that safe spaces are a potentially useful construct if done correctly.

The biggest problem that the Social Justice Warriors commit is a problem that Hayek pointed out so eloquently in The Fatal Conceit. As Hayek points out, modern man exists in “two worlds at once.” One, we live in the micro-level war world of intimate social relations such as families, immediate communities, and friends. (The type of people who are included in Dunbar’s number.) But we also exist in the “extended order,” the macro-level relationships that include humans we interact with and know, but only distantly; like trading partners in a large market, other citizens of a nation, or other members of our larger culture. Hayek’s writings on this are worth quoting at length:

Moreover the structures of the extended order are made up not only of individuals but also of many, often overlapping, sub-orders within which old instinctual responses, such as solidarity and altruism, continue to retain some importance by assisting voluntary collaboration, even though they are incapable, by themselves, of creating a basis for the more extended order. Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to liver simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (ie., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once.  (Bold mine, Italics his)

Those who would seek to create a safe space out of the entire university or society at large are applying the rules of our macro-cosmos to our micro-cosmos. The idea that we should not bring up certain topics or ideas in certain social situations out of considerations for our fellow human beings is the truth behind the safe space. But to apply that principle to every social situation within a university or nation is a huge mistake. Safe spaces make sense for some of those overlapping sub-orders and micro-level organizations, but not for the extended order of society. So while it is a huge mistake and assault to make a safe space out of an entire college campus, perhaps it is reasonable to make safe spaces out of a dorm room, or a professor’s office, or a meeting for a student group. While it is obviously a huge act of the most heinous form of censorship to ban people from questioning the morality of homosexuality, perhaps it makes sense to not bring up that topic at a college GSA meeting where many of the LGBT students are just seeking a place to belong, or when talking to a group of LGBT students who are facing severe psychological issues while being discriminated against.

If you think applying the concept of safe spaces everywhere and anywhere is always wrong, you’re probably apt to attack me for being “politically correct” for defending the concept in some situations. I agree, we shouldn’t be “politically correct” in the way that term is typically used, but perhaps we should be decent human beings and allow people to freely associate.