Critical Thinking Is the Only Thing That’s Been Stolen

By Bob Smith, Commander, U.S. Navy (Ret.)

At this year’s Grammy Awards, Billie Eilish offered a line that drew immediate applause: “No one is illegal on stolen land.”

It’s the kind of statement engineered for viral sincerity, morally packaged, emotionally resonant, and intellectually absurd. Because the moment you test it, even lightly, the entire premise unravels, not just legally but civilizationally.

If All Land Is “Stolen,” Then No Land Is Governable

Let’s leave America for a moment and travel to Great Britain.

Under the “stolen land” framework, modern Britain has no legitimate claim to its own land. The island changed hands repeatedly across successive civilizations, from Neolithic monument builders and Bronze Age tribes to Celtic Britons, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. So, who owns London today?

Do we roll the map back to pre-Roman tribal boundaries? Do the French reclaim Norman lands? Do Scandinavian governments get coastal Viking settlements?

If conquest voids sovereignty, then every modern border worldwide dissolves. It doesn’t stop at geography. The Norman conquest didn’t just reshape England’s ruling class; it reshaped the English language itself. Much of modern English vocabulary derives from Norman influence.

While we’re at it, we should probably return all Roman contributions born of conquest: calendars, plumbing, road systems, concrete engineering, and astronomical frameworks. Since Rome itself absorbed knowledge from Greece, Egypt, and the broader Middle East, we would also need to surrender mathematics, legal systems, and medicine, among countless other inheritances.

African Moors invaded Iberia in 711, conquering Visigothic Spain and leaving their architectural imprint on earlier Roman foundations. Centuries later, Spanish kingdoms reclaimed the peninsula and carried that blended design tradition to the Americas. The Santa Barbara architecture everyone loves, with white stucco walls, arches, and red tile roofs, sits at the far end of that conquest lineage.

Civilizations inherit more than land, and the progression of civilization was not a peaceful relay of ideas. It was, more often, a succession of conquests layered atop one another.

Civilization exists because humanity eventually replaced perpetual claims of conquest with recognized sovereignty, treaties, and legal finality. Without that transition, we never leave the tribal era and enter the modern world.

California Was Not Seized; It Was Purchased.

California did not materialize through unilateral seizure. It transferred under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which formally ended the Mexican-American War and established U.S. sovereignty under international law, regardless of the earlier colonial history that preceded Mexican governance.

Under that treaty, the United States:

• Paid $15 million to Mexico.

• Settled over $3 million in Mexican debts.

• And, with a big foot stomp here, the United States honored Mexican citizens’ property rights in the ceded territories, offering citizenship to residents who stayed and recognizing existing land grants, a rather unusual posture in the long history of conquest. Ask anyone from Gaul.

Was 19th-century geopolitics complex? Of course. But the legal mechanism was a treaty settlement, the same instrument used globally to finalize wars and establish borders.

Applying the Logic Consistently

Now, let’s apply the Grammy statement consistently. If no one can be illegal on stolen land, then ownership itself becomes illegitimate. Which brings us, awkwardly, back to Billie.

By her logic, we’re all free to use her Los Angeles home whenever we like. If sovereignty and title are invalid constructs built on stolen land, then private property does not exist. Not just your house, Ms. Eilish. Everything, including your music. Without a sovereign nation to protect your rights, intellectual property does not exist.

Few advocates carry the argument to its logical conclusion. Because once applied evenly, it does not merely challenge borders. It collapses the legal framework that protects property, movement, and ownership in the first place.

A sovereign nation is an independent, self-governing political entity with supreme authority over its territory, population, and internal and external affairs. It maintains defined borders, a permanent population, a functional government, and the capacity to engage diplomatically with other states.

Sovereignty establishes constitutional rights, statutory protections, due process, immigration law, property rights, criminal enforcement, and the territorial authority required to govern a nation’s borders and population.

You cannot claim legal violations from a system you argue has no lawful standing to exist. Sovereignty is not an optional feature of rights. It is their foundation. There is an irony in being among the few people in history with the luxury of living in a country that protects every citizen’s right to say nonsense like “stolen land.”

Critical Thinking Has Been Stolen

We’ve watched “stolen land” activism spread across high schools, universities, and public demonstrations. Educators and political figures repeat the language, often uncritically, and young people absorb a worldview that frames their society as morally void.

Acknowledging Indigenous history is not the same as nullifying modern sovereignty. We should learn about Indigenous civilizations, colonial conflicts, displacement, and cultural contributions. That knowledge matters. But there is a difference between studying history and delegitimizing civilization.

You can honor past societies without arguing that modern governance must be dismantled to reconcile history. If the standard becomes the undoing of all historical injustice, the endpoint is not justice; it is societal paralysis. Were we able to reverse it all with a magic wand, the result would be the collapse of modern civilization.

And if that’s the framework, I’ll begin preparing my own legal filing, a transhistorical property claim against Rome for unlawful occupation of my ancestral French, pardon me, Gallic vineyard. I assume the statute of limitations is flexible when we’re litigating two millennia of imperial expansion.

Until then, we might consider grounding immigration debates in law, history, and functional governance, rather than applause lines that sound profound onstage but dissolve under the weight of reality. The sovereign legal framework of the United States enables global celebrities, including Grammy Award-winning Billie Eilish, to exist.

America has one of the most durable systems for civic change ever built. That system depends on civic literacy and critical thinking, and on educators teaching how laws are made, debated, and reformed in this great country. If citizens hope to inspire meaningful change, the path runs through democratic participation and legislative action, not through rhetorical slogans or confrontations with law enforcement in the streets.

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Bob Smith is a retired Navy veteran and candidate for California’s 24th Congressional District. www.bobsmithforcongress.com

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