There’s a saying—or maybe a truism—that the test of any new technology lies in its ability to reproduce pornography. Long ago, pornography was the stuff of private collections: crude figurines and drawings that spread their influence only as far as they could be carried. But man could not live in this wilderness forever. He had opposable thumbs and pressing needs, and thus were born woodblock printing, engraving, movable type, daguerreotype, halftone printing, photography, the moving image. Man needed these innovations, of course, to spread the great truths of God, nature, king, and country. But it was never very long before some guy wandered into the workroom of the newest inventor, took a look at his gizmo, and thought, You know what I could use that for?  

Down through the ages, one thing united these mass-produced forms of pornography: the understanding that no matter how exciting, they were always and only a pale imitation of the real thing. Any traveling salesman who checked into a motel with his copy of Playboy would rather have had a human being on his arm.

But then the internet arrived.

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Where would this take us? Well, now we know. The heterosexual man can now have what many see as a rich sex life without ever needing to deal with an actual woman.

There are men who have fallen in love with sex dolls, the way toddlers fall in love with teddy bears, although for children the toy is a transitional object. Early this month, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that AI-powered sex robots aren’t far away from the U.S. market: “less than five years probably.” They will be able to provide everything except human connection, and what is that anyway? Human relationships, especially between the sexes, are fraught with diverging interests and needs, and when you get right down to it, aren’t women kind of a drag? With their talk-talk-talk and their dinner parties, and their pouting about laundry that never gets washed the right way? Your sex robot won’t do that. She’ll never make you go apple picking. She will do only what you want to do.

Sex has the ability to create or strengthen a bond between people, and—no matter how many precautions you might take against this terrible outcome—you could find yourself emotionally attached to a person you have sex with. Before online porn, men had an obvious incentive to put up with the stress of dating, and they developed the social skills necessary to close the deal: enough resilience to ask a woman out, and then a second woman, if the first one rejected them; the drive to locate a clean shirt; and the skill to make conversation over two orders of chicken piccata. It could be awkward; it could be a nightmare. But whether the resulting attachment lasted half a century or a single week, one thing was certain: While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans.

But who needs to spiff up now? Porn will never reject you or look at you with a pitying gaze. It’s always there, it never disappoints, and you never have to dig through the clothes hamper for something that smells okayish. As Michael says in The Boys in the Band, one good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to look your best.

Watching online porn has become most adolescents’ first sexual experience. The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hard-core porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War. (Probably a good thing, because we really needed to win that one.) Because of the internet’s power to desensitize people and wear down their natural responses to shocking things, and because of the way these algorithms work, young people quickly proceed to more and more extreme videos, and—as it has always been—these earliest experiences of sexual events pass deeply into their sense of what sex should be.

You can’t spend 15 minutes scrolling through a porn site without coming across a video in which a woman seems to be not performing fear or pain, but actually experiencing those things. If you’re one of those people who enjoy watching coerced sex, you’ll never be bored for a second of your life. As far as the moral equations of watching porn go, the one that matters is: Are you excited by the obvious abuse of women, or have you learned to countenance that abuse as a necessary cost of your own pleasure? And which of those is worse?

We’re talking about a private, individual experience. Could that have an impact on society? Surely it does. When straight men don’t need women for sex, a question starts to form: What do they need them for? If it’s having children, these men are going to have to surface out in the world and meet some women, even if they think that means settling for second-best sex. Someone whose adolescence has been spent using a phone and laptop for sex probably isn’t skilled in making conversation with actual women, which will be a problem if he decides to get out among the apple pickers.

The porn-first man tends to be an Andrew Tate kind of guy. Former kickboxer, chancellor of Hustlers University, early-episode rejectee from Big Brother (he said a video of him whipping a woman with a belt had been edited to take out the humor and fun of the moment), he’s an influencer and the current president of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. He spent the past two years in Romania after he was accused of rape and human trafficking, but late last month was allowed to travel to the freedom of the United States, only to land in the flypaper of Florida, where he is now the subject of another criminal investigation. (He has denied any wrongdoing.)

Tate is charismatic and mesmerizing, a perfect companion to the lonely masturbator. You’re not a loser; you’re a king! He provides hours and hours of online content warning men that women are trying to emasculate them. What he’s gesturing to is an old idea, probably more true than not: that it’s in society’s best interest for men to couple off with women, because women civilize men. When confronted with that notion, women reject it: Their job isn’t to civilize men. When men see the same adage, they feel uncomfortable (what man wants to be “civilized” by another person, especially by a woman?).

But men taught that women are “barely sentient,” there to be used and abused, will likely spend their lives alone.

The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price.

The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water.

When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada.

So I feel both morally compelled and professionally qualified to examine the Trump administration’s interesting but far from original idea of absorbing that country into the union.

There are, as Donald Trump and Don Corleone might put it, two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be if Canadians rose up en masse clamoring to join the United States. Even so, there would be awkwardness.

[Read: The angry Canadian]

Canada is slightly larger than America. That would mean that the “cherished 51st state,” as Trump calls it, would be lopsided in terms of territory. It would be 23 times larger than California, which would be fine for owning the libs, but it would also be 14 times larger than the Lone Star State, which would definitely cause some pursed lips and steely looks there. Messing with Texas is a bad idea.

The new state would be the largest in population too, with 40 million people—more than California by a hair, and considerably more than Texas, Florida, or New York. Its size would pose a whole bunch of problems for Trump: Canada is a much more left-wing country than the United States, and absorbing it could well revive the political fortunes of progressives. If its 10 provinces became 10 states instead of one, only three would probably vote for the GOP; the other seven would likely go for Democrats. That might mean adding six Republican senators and 14 Democrats. If Trump were impeached a third time, that might produce the supermajority required for conviction in the Senate.

But such political ramifications are purely academic considerations at the moment. Polling suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all Canadians cling to sovereignty. Having been denied the easy way of absorbing Canada, therefore, the United States might have to try the hard way, conquering the country and administering it as a territory until it is purged of Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever the Canadian equivalent of RINOs turns out to be.

Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, “You have been conquered into liberty,” an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants.

There were moments of brilliant leadership in this invasion, particularly in a daring autumn march through Maine to the very walls of Quebec. There was also a great deal of poltroonery and bungling. The Americans had three talented generals. The first, Richard Montgomery, got killed in the opening assault on Quebec. The second, John Thomas, died of smallpox, along with many of his men. Inoculation was possible, but, like today’s vaccine skeptics, many thought it a bad idea. You can visit the capacious cemetery for the victims on Île aux Noix, now Fort Lennox, Canada.

The third general, the most talented of the lot, was Benedict Arnold, who held the expedition together even after suffering a grievous leg wound. Eventually, however, he grew disgusted with a Congress rather less craven and incompetent than its contemporary successor and became a traitor, accepting a commission as a brigadier general in the British army and fighting against American forces.

We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is perhaps unfamiliar with the Battle of Chateaugay. The last three letters are, after all, gay, and as such, the battle has doubtless been expunged from Defense Department websites and databases, meeting the same fate as the Enola Gay. Still, it is instructive. An invading force of 2,600 American regulars encountered about 1,500 Canadian militia members, volunteers, and Mohawks under a Francophone colonel, Charles de Salaberry.  They were defeated and had to withdraw.

Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border.

Perhaps today’s Canadians are a flimsier lot. The Canadian armed forces are quite small (the army numbers only about 42,000, including reservists), although spirited and hardy. One should note with respect that 158 Canadians were killed fighting alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan. But even if the Canadian military were overcome after some initial bloody battles, what then?

Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum.

[Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally]

Parenthetically, there remains the problem of the First Nations (as the Canadians refer to them), whom they treated somewhat less badly than Americans treated Native Americans (as we refer to them). There are about 50,000 Mohawks straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and they are fearless, which is why you will find them building skyscrapers at terrifying heights above the street. As members of what used to be the Iroquois Confederacy, they were ferocious warriors, and they retain a martial tradition. It is sobering to consider that they may think, with reason, that we are the illegal immigrants who have ruined the country, and therefore hold a grudge.

There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers.

Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau***. It could help avoid embarrassment.