Greenland: Are the Danes Colonialists? CNN’s Enten on the Public’s Response to U.S.’s Seizing Maduro. Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s Husband Smacks Phone of Questioner’s Hands. And More
If it’s Wednesday, it must be Greenland.
The icy shores of Greenland are today’s topic. It falls to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to explain that the White House is using rhetoric to pressure Denmark into negotiations, and certainly not necessarily as a prelude to military action:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers that recent administration threats against Greenland didn’t signal an imminent invasion and that the goal is to buy the island from Denmark, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Rubio’s statements, which were made Monday during a closed briefing, come as the White House has been offering increasingly belligerent statements about controlling the island. President Trump and senior administration officials have publicly declined to rule out seizing the territory by force.
On the other hand, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said Monday that Greenland should belong to the United States and said no one would oppose the U.S. militarily should it stake a claim to the self-ruling island. You can imagine the blowback. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has a measured editorial (“Invade Greenland? Why?”) today:
Americans are trying to figure out President Trump’s goals in Venezuela, but spare a thought this week for Greenland. The President has good strategic instincts about the world’s largest island, so it’s regrettable that his interest is devolving into a self-defeating exercise in U.S. bullying.
“We need Greenland,” Mr. Trump said on Air Force One this weekend. “It’s so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
The U.S. does need to hedge against future Russian and Chinese inroads in the Danish territory. Nearby are vital submarine lanes, and the island hosts U.S. missile-defense radars that protect the homeland. Beneath the ice are reserves of rare-earth minerals. Liberals booed Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in 2019 when he suggested buying the island, but he had a point.
Yet the operative word was buy—a free agreement among the U.S., our NATO ally Denmark, and Greenland’s 56,000 people…. Maybe the Greenland affair is merely what now passes for online MAGA entertainment. But Mr. Trump would help his own cause in every hemisphere if he dropped the invade-Greenland routine.
Down with Colonialism! An article in Unherd accuses Denmark of “adopting a colonial logic” on Greenland. Meanwhile, Rich Lowry tells the president how to get Greenland without grabbing it.
Back to Venezuela: President Trump announced last night on Truth Social that Venezuela will turn over 30 million to 50 million barrels of oil to the United States, to be sold at market value and with the proceeds controlled by the U.S. Trump added that the proceeds will “benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” But were President Trump’s Venezuela moves legal? The Manhattan Institute’s Ilya Shapiro and Santiago Vidal Calvo of the same esteemed institution answer in the affirmative. Their article at City Journal states the president’s actions “have hundreds of years of precedent behind them.”
And People Like It: CNN’s political analyst Harry Enten says that before the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, Americans strongly disapproved of such a move. But polls swung dramatically after the fact. Enten says:
It turns out Americans like what they deem to be successful foreign policy operations. And in this case, they view the ousting of Maduro, at least up to this point, as a successful one, and therefore the support, way up.
But Democrats, who long harangued Trump for not taking out Maduro, are now apoplectic that he has removed the tyrant. USA Today columnist Ingrid Jaques writes that the successful Venezuela incursion could help the GOP in the midterms. Speaking of the midterms, President Trump admitted what we already know: If the GOP loses the House, President Trump will be impeached. Again.
Cover Girl: Congratulations to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new tenant adviser, Cea Weaver, who makes the coveted cover of the New York Post this morning. Headline: “Trump Officials Threaten NYC over Zo Aide Who Says ‘’Seize Private Property’ Since It’s ‘White Supremacy.” Ms. Weaver was also prominently featured this morning in National Review:
If Cea Weaver did not exist, one would be hard-pressed to invent her. Weaver seems to have been designed in a laboratory to work in the Ideological Compliance Department of the East German Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung, but, as the result of an unfortunate accident with a time machine, ended up overseeing housing policy in the most important city in the United States. She believes that “rent control is a perfect solution to everything” — not least because it is an “effective way to shrink the value of real estate.”
She considers that “private property is a weapon of white supremacy,” she believes that “homeownership is racist,” and she holds that the highest aim of government ought to be to “impoverish the *white* middle class.” And they say that ambition is dead in America!
Naturally, Cea Weaver’s approach to housing will not work. But, then, Cea Weaver’s approach to housing is not supposed to work so much as it is supposed to collapse the system completely.
Toxic Masculinity? Squad Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s husband, who has a fascinating history, valiantly protected his wife from having to answer a question on alleged billion-dollar-plus childcare fraud in Minnesota. You need to read this:
The felony-convicted husband of progressive “Squad” lawmaker Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., slapped a phone out of a reporter’s hands Monday inside a city hall building after they attempted to approach the congresswoman to ask her a question about alleged childcare fraud in Minnesota.
“Congresswoman Pressley, do you support –” the interviewer could be heard asking as he approached Pressley with his phone camera on record before Conan Harris, Pressley’s husband who spent 10 years in prison on felony drug trafficking charges, smacked the phone out of the questioner’s hand.
Giddy Up: Best line—and most bizarrely suggestive imagery—from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s angry presser yesterday:
“Expect for the next 11 months for me to ride you like you’ve never been ridden, to make sure that you’re doing your job.”
I want to get serious and call your attention to a Daily Caller report on a distressing porn epidemic among women:
Women have long been the target audience for romance novels. As the 20th century drew to a close, the “chick flick” found a counterpart in “chick lit”: Formulaic, commercially successful fiction, identifiable in bookstores by a cartoon woman on the cover. These books were usually silly, not smutty.
Read on to encounter something really disturbing.
Intrepid Powerline has a daring blog headlined “More Left-Wing ‘Trans’ Violence,” pegged to but not limited to the young man, who was arrested for vandalizing Vice President J.D. Vance’s Ohio house. Another Demographic, liberal white women—or, Affluent White Liberal Women (AWFUL)—come in for criticism from PJ Media’s Kevin Downey Jr.
Some Good News: We hear a lot of gloom and doom about the vanishing middle class. Stephen Rose and Scott Winship of AEI have a new study out that finds that the middle class is shrinking because its members are becoming part of the booming upper-middle class.
As you know, yesterday was January 6. Both the White House (here) and the Democrats (here) observed the day. Vice President Vance was naughty (here), and ace scribe Byron York had a serious story (“Jack Smith Reveals Jan. 6 Committee Charade“). But my hands-down favorite take on yesterday’s observances is this one (from the Babylon Bee):
Democrats Solemnly Remember the Only Riot They Didn’t Like
Bye-bye.
