Never Give Up. Never Surrender.

Lessons from the past year, and from past decades.

Never give up! Never surrender! Fine words from a fine movie, but also a lesson of recent weeks, months, and years, and something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while.

I’ve often used the example of gun rights progress as proof that determined work can overcome the resistance of basically the entire establishment. But this tweet summarizes it well:

This is absolutely right. What it took was determination, persistence, and a combination of intellectual capital and grassroots politics.

And it’s good to be reminded of this, because I get discouraged too. I’ve been teaching space law since 1990 (and writing law review articles about it since I was in law school) and sometime in the early aughts I was getting discouraged about it going anywhere. We were still launching shuttles, there was no noticeable movement toward expanding human presence beyond the International Space Station, and costs of launching things to orbit were actually going up, not down. I even quit teaching the course for a few years to focus on other things.

But not that long after I entered into my dark night of the soul, Elon Musk appeared to turn things around. Now we’re making progress at an enormous rate. Sure, I wish it had happened in the 1990s so that I might have been able to buy a ticket to orbit by now, but at least it’s happening now, more or less as those of us pushing for space settlement in the 1990s and before envisioned: Reusable hardware, methane-fueled engines (you can make methane from the Martian atmosphere for refueling using 19^th century technology, as Bob Zubrin demonstrated three decades ago as part of his Mars Direct architecture, which Elon Musk seems to have been heavily influenced by), and plans for settlement of Mars and the Moon and exploitation of asteroid resources. We’re finally getting the 21^st Century I was hoping for.

Heck, by buying Twitter and renaming it X, Musk even started the process of rolling back journalistic disinformation in America and elsewhere. That was more than I ever hoped for.

(I still want my flying cars, though).

But of course, the real poster-man for never giving up is Donald Trump. Consider that they were talking about impeaching him before he was ever sworn in – apparently just being Donald Trump is itself a high crime and misdemeanor to some – actually impeached him twice over absurdities, cooked up a fake Russian-collusion scandal, turned the entire bureaucracy against him, waged civil and criminal lawfare in numerous jurisdictions, subjected him to state and federal prosecution, raided his home and went through Melania’s underwear, tried to kill him (at least) twice, etc., etc. When the absurd disinformation campaign about Biden’s mental state collapsed, they installed – and that’s literally what they did – Kamala as a replacement without any kind of a democratic process. Then the press, which had always treated her like the third-rate loser that she was, suddenly did its level best to shine her up and drag her over the finish line. All while peddling polls showing her winning, as she raised more than double his money.

And he never gave up, he never surrendered, and now he’s won, and CEOs who were sucking up to Kamala are now sucking up to him. He has majorities in the House and Senate.

And, with the help of powerful new allies like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Bill Ackman – plus massive public support -- he stopped the truly horrible 1547-page continuing resolution last week (which among other things contained immunity from prosecution and investigation for the January 6 committee – talk about an admission of guilt!) and replaced it with a much shorter and, if not perfect, better bill. Hopes in some quarters that the super-narrow GOP majority in Congress would let them roll him have now dimmed.

Now Trump’s in charge, he’s naming cabinet members and ambassadors, and – with the exception of Matt Gaetz, who I suspect was always a sacrificial lamb – his appointments look likely to sail through. Had he plea-bargained and slunk away, as, say, Mitt Romney would surely have done under similar pressure, he’d be a bum. Instead, he’s on top.

Never give up, never surrender. It’s a lesson we can all learn for the coming year.

[The best I could do with Grok at getting Trump as Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest.]

And as always, if you like these essays, please take out a paid subscription. I will thank you, and my family will thank you.