Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of “begging and blackmailing” European nations for financial aid in the latest public spat following Kyiv’s decision to shut off Eastern Europe’s access to Russian gas.
During a parliamentary committee meeting convened by the Slovak opposition to address Fico’s recent visit to Moscow, the Slovak premier delivered a scathing rebuke of Zelensky. “He walks around Europe, just begging and blackmailing others, asking for money. This just has to stop,” Fico said. He went further, labeling the Ukrainian president as unreliable and citing alleged broken agreements on gas transit involving Azerbaijani gas and Slovak transport routes via Ukraine.
Fico contrasted this with Russia, which he called a “reliable energy partner” and claimed to have secured assurances from President Vladimir Putin on gas supplies to Slovakia during a visit to the Kremlin last month.
“Russia has never deceived us, unlike Ukraine,” he claimed, referencing a 2009 incident where Ukraine allegedly refused Slovakia’s request for gas during a supply crisis.
The parliamentary session followed the suspension of Russian gas transit through Ukraine, a move that threatens Slovakia’s economy, which relies heavily on transit fees. Slovakia faces a potential loss of up to €500 million annually, sparking fears of energy insecurity and economic fallout. Fico proposed alternative solutions, including utilizing storage facilities and pipeline connections with Western Europe, while reiterating Putin’s commitment to fulfilling supply obligations. The logistics of bypassing Ukraine, however, are proving to be problematic.
In response to the transit halt, Fico has threatened to reduce Slovakia’s humanitarian aid to Ukraine, including subsidies for Ukrainian refugees. He also warned of cutting electricity supplies, further straining Slovak-Ukrainian relations.
Zelensky took to X to respond forcefully to Fico’s comments, accusing him of prioritizing ties with Moscow over his own country and the European Union.
“It’s good that Slovakia’s Prime Minister Fico has finally returned from his vacation at a luxurious hotel in Vietnam and is now in Bratislava. For him, personally, it must be challenging — switching from living in luxury to now trying to fix his own mistakes,” he wrote.
It’s good that Slovakia’s Prime Minister Fico has finally returned from his vacation at a luxurious hotel in Vietnam and is now in Bratislava. For him, personally, it must be challenging—switching from living in luxury to now trying to fix his own mistakes. It was an obvious…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) January 12, 2025
He claimed to have offered assistance to Slovakia during the expected transition by European nations away from reliance on Russian energy, “but Fico arrogantly refused.”
“Many in Europe warned him that doing nothing and waiting was not an option,” Zelensky added, accusing his Slovak counterpart of now “resorting to PR, lies, and loud accusations to shift the blame away from himself onto someone else.”
He claimed that Fico’s “losing bet” on Russian energy had undermined European unity and energy security.
The escalating tensions between Slovakia and Ukraine evidence broader challenges in Europe’s energy landscape. The suspension of Russian gas transit through Ukraine has intensified debates over energy diversification, with many European nations seeking alternatives to reduce dependency on Russian supplies.
Zelensky called for stronger collaboration with the European Commission and the U.S. to expand gas supplies and offset the impact of Russian disruptions, urging Slovakia to align with the EU’s shared goals.
Slovakia has been criticized in some quarters for taking a notably different approach from many European Union countries. Fico’s government halted military aid to Ukraine from state reserves while permitting the continuation of commercial arms sales. This policy placed Slovakia closer to Hungary in its critical stance on Western military support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
Last month, Fico enraged Zelensky by claiming that Ukraine would not be invited to join NATO and would lose part of its territory in any viable peace agreement, asserting that Russia would maintain control over Crimea and other occupied regions.
“Ukraine will not receive an invitation to NATO. Russia will never leave either Crimea or the territory it controls. Whoever does not know the Russian soul should forget about defeating it,” he remarked.
The underlying strength of economics is that (when approached honestly and with respect to the data) it can give us a relatively accurate measure of progress versus cost. If the rewards outweigh the costs after careful calculation then that economic endeavor will bear fruit. The ability to gauge production, innovation and prosperity with an unbiased eye is essential to true economics.
The problem is that economics is not only a mathematical science, it is also, for lack of a better term, a social science. One has to understand individual psychology and mass psychology. You have to be knowledgeable in the inconsistencies of human emotion and desire as much as you are knowledgeable in the hard realities of supply and demand. Furthermore, not all people that engage in economic study do so for the benefit of humanity.
There is a contingent of financial elitists that seek to use their understanding of the psychological side of economics to socially engineer political outcomes. We’ve heard it said that nuclear science or genetic science offer a power so terrible that they could wipe out civilization if exploited by the wrong hands. I would argue that economic science in the wrong hands outdoes every other competitor because it can be used to enslave humanity forever.
Case in point: What happens when economics is combined with far-left activism and scientific cultism based on fabricated claims? What happens when a group of ultra-wealthy Fabian socialists combine their resources to strangle the free market and manipulate economic outcomes? What do you get when a vast network of international corporations abandon competition and profit for a long term agenda of power and control?
Well, you get insidious programs like ESG and groups like the Council For Inclusive Capitalism. You get direct cooperation between governments and corporations to force a specific way of thinking and living. They present it as philanthropy when it is really a complex form of tyranny.
These specific efforts have failed, but not without much struggle on the part of liberty voices and the alternative media. ESG is mostly dead and as far as I can tell the Council for Inclusive Capitalism has been abandoned. However, the people behind these programs remain in the same positions of influence.
In terms of the diversity, equity and inclusions subset, the woke model is in popular media is breaking down. You’re going to see less and less progressive pundits and content creators trying to mold public opinion using “social justice” over the next few years. They know their time is over. But, the other half of ESG, the climate change agenda, is still well underway.
The World Economic Forum, the premier globalist think tank, has released more information this past month showcasing their plans to make carbon taxation about “justice, fairness and DEI”. When they talk about “equity in climate change” what they are referring to is a developing project designed to redistribute wealth away from first-world western nations into the coffers of third-world countries.
The narrative is that these parts of the world have been victimized by climate change perpetrated by the developed world. In other words, our success is supposedly built on the backs of poor nations. It’s nothing more than a rewriting of the old Marxist attack on free markets – If someone wins then someone else has to lose and that’s just not fair, so let’s tear the whole society down so that there can be no winners.
But it’s not free markets that have created the wealth gap that enrages leftists. International corporations are, in fact, socialist by definition and by nature. Without protection from governments, without their extensive partnerships with bureaucrats and politicians along with their limited liability and corporate personhood, most companies would not have an edge on everyone else.
Carbon credits will only exacerbate that dynamic and widen the wealth gap even further, because carbon taxation will crush small businesses and leave only massive corporations able to weather the tax burden.
Sure, tax dollars from rich countries will also be redistributed to poor countries, but this money will not be going to the destitute in Africa or Asia. It will be going into the hands of more corporations, more non-profits and more politicians. In the end, the middle class which made the west a beacon of freedom will disappear completely. Everyone will be equal – We will all be equally poor.
The WEF calls this shift a global “reorganization” of how we engage with the economy. At the forefront of this plan are, once again, globalist think tanks and non-profits partnered with the biggest corporations and central banks.
The globalists want to redefine how we calculate growth according to their illusory metrics. How does one quantify happiness, or fairness, or environmental purity and then add that into GDP? It’s not possible, at least not in an unbiased manner.
Flowery terminology like equity and inclusion have nothing to do with production or economic survival. They do, though, have a lot in common with the social engineering ideals of ESG that most of the west is rejecting. They’re giving “inclusive capitalism” a climate change paint job.
Progressives often condemn the free market profit motive as a “disease” that will destroy our species, but believe me, the worst thing that can possibly happen to the western world today is for corporate moguls to decide they don’t care about money anymore. When groups of mega rich narcopaths discover ideology and start seeing you and I and society as their pet project, the world is in deep trouble. What is most disturbing is that they scratch and grasp for greater power while pretending as if they’re doing it “for our benefit”.
Will a few of them do good? Sure, that happens at times. But, usually when elites try to influence culture through carrot or stick methods the results are disastrous.
We need to understand this reality first before we can ever understand the motives behind the “net zero” movement. The persistent globalist push for carbon taxation has nothing to do with saving the planet and everything to do with changing the very soil of the economic landscape. Keep in mind that globalism is just a modernized form of feudalism posing as socially conscious governance.
These people don’t actually care about the environment or equality; they care about environmental taxation and “equity”. These are very different things.
And lets not forget that climate scientist claims are based on data derived from the 1880s onward, while they act as if millions of years of the Earth’s temperature history doesn’t exist. Temperatures in the past have been far hotter (and far colder) than they are today, and atmospheric carbon content records going back millions of years show there is no causational relationship between carbon emissions and warming conditions.
The moment you look at the Earth’s climate outside of that tiny sliver of 140 years that climate scientists use for their data, the entire man-made global warming theory falls apart. We barely just exited an ice age and these people are doom mongering about 1.5 degrees Celsius!
Let’s instead consider the short term ramifications of using an equity model for the global economy. What will happen when fairness becomes more important than merit and net zero becomes more important than prosperity?
The more self sufficiency people have, the more free they can be. The more dependency they have on the system, the easier they are to enslave. Carbon controls create an economic environment in which self sufficiency is impossible because they centralize all production into the hands of a select group of self appointed high priests in charge of climate change management. They get to choose the tax burden arbitrarily and they get to choose the conditions of production. Therefore, the elites will control the means of production, all while telling us that those in poverty are the beneficiaries.
The carbon scheme seems to be the last fallback of globalist organizations to create a rationale for wealth redistribution. What will they do if it fails? That’s hard to say. I suppose they will try to start WWIII (I would argue that it’s already started). The point is, much of what the globalists do is a rehashing of old-hat centralization and oligarchy. Call it ESG, call it carbon taxes, call it DEI, the goal is the same – The destruction of the west to make way for a new dark age.
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Pentagon Reluctantly Admits Russian ‘Incremental Gains’ In Eastern Ukraine
With just days to go before the United States gets a new Commander-in-Chief with Trump’s inauguration on Jan.20, the Pentagon has made a rare admission, acknowledging that Russian forces are basically dominating on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The Pentagon during its daily press briefing on Monday acknowledged Russian forces’ “incremental gains” in the Donbass. Below is from the question and answer transcript:
Q: And then a completely different topic — can you give us an update on the Ukrainian battlefield? Does Putin indeed have the upper hand right now?
PENTAGON PRESS SECRETARY MAJOR GENERAL PAT RYDER: Well, what we’re seeing on the battlefield is that, especially in the East, Russia has made some incremental gains. Of course, it’s very tough fighting, as well as in the Kursk region as well. But when you talk about the upper hand, of course, tactically, again other than those incremental gains, what you’re seeing strategically is that again Russia has not achieved any of Its strategic objectives that it set for itself almost three years ago.
This does seem to be a Department of Defense admission that yes, Putin does have the upper hand in the war, despite the Pentagon spokesman’s reluctance to fully put it in these terms.
Russia’s state-run TASS news has summarized these significant gains as follows:
The Russian Defense Ministry reported on January 6 that Russian forces had liberated the city of Kurakhovo in the Donetsk People’s Republic. The cities of Avdeyevka and Ugledar were liberated in 2024. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said on December 16 that Ukraine’s overall losses in the course of Russia’s special military operation had amounted to nearly one million troops.
As for the mentioned immense casualty toll, this is impossible to verify. Both warring parties have an interest in inflating numbers of war deaths on the other side.
The start of this week has seen reports that Russian forces have captured the the village of Pishchane, which is merely five miles southwest of the strategic Donetsk city of Pokrovsk. In other locations Russian troops are said to bejustwithin a mile of the outskirts of the city.
Reuters on Monday said a Ukrainian coal mine in the area has ceased production as the war encroaches. “They have all stopped working now,” an industry source said of workers at the mine shafts in Pokrovsk.
“There’s no production there, they’re only working on the surface,” another source said, citing an ongoing evacuation of the mines and the emergency halt in operations.
Below: Watch the Russian military’s steady progression in the Pokrovsk area stretching back to the first week of August:
The Russian military has been making slow but steady advances on Pokrovsk since the summer of 2024. It represents a last big Ukrainian stronghold, the capture of which will ensure Russia’s hold over the whole of Donetsk. It would also give Russia the ability to cut off the E-50 highway connecting Pokrovsk to the Dnipropetrovsk city of Pavlohrad. This would be a major blow to the Ukrainian army’s logistical operations.
Peter Ford served in the UK Foreign Ministry for many years including being UK Ambassador to Bahrain (1999-2003) and then Syria (2003-2006). Following that, he was representative to the Arab world for the Commissioner General of United Nations Relief and Works Agency. He was interviewed by Rick Stering on Jan 6, 2025.
RS: Why do you think the Syrian military and government collapsed so rapidly?
Peter Ford: Everybody was surprised but with hindsight, we shouldn’t have been. Over more than a decade, the Syrian army had been hollowed out by the extremely dire economic situation in Syria, mainly caused by western sanctions. Syria only had a few hours of electricity a day, no money to buy weapons and no ability to use the international banking system to buy anything whatsoever. It’s no surprise that the Army was run down. With hindsight, you might say the surprise is that the Syrian government and Army were successful in driving back the Islamists. The Syrian Army forced them into the redoubt of Idlib four or five years ago. But after that point, the Syrian army deteriorated, became less battle ready on the technical level and also morale.
Syrian soldiers are mainly conscripts and they suffer as much as any ordinary Syrian from the really dreadful economic situation in Syria. I hesitate to admit it, but the Western sanctions were extremely effectively in doing what they were designed to do: to bring the Syrian economy down to its knees. So we have to say, and I say this with deep regret, the sanctions worked. The sanctions did exactly what they were designed to do to make the Syrian people suffer, and thereby to bring about discontent with what they call the regime.
Ordinary Syrians didn’t understand the complexities of geopolitics, and they blamed the Syrian government for everything: not having electricity, not having food, not having gas, oil, high inflation. Everything that came from being cut off from the world economy and not having supporters with bottomless pockets.
Syria was being attacked and occupied by major military powers (Turkey, USA, Israel). Plus thousands of foreign jihadis. The Syrian army was so demoralized that they really were a paper tiger by the end of the day.
RS: Do you think the UK and the US were involved in training the jihadis prior to the December attack on Aleppo?
Peter Ford: Absolutely. The Israelis also. The leader of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), Ahmed Hussein al Sharaa (formerly known as Mohammad abu Jolani) almost certainly has British advisors in the background. In fact, I detected the hand of such advisors in some of the statements made in impeccable English. The statements had Americanized spelling, so the CIA are in there too. Jolani is a puppet, a marionette saying what they want him to say.
RS: What’s is the current situation, a month after the collapse?
Peter Ford: There are skirmishes here and there, but broadly, the Islamists and foreign fighters are ruling the roost. There are pockets of resistance in Latakia where the Alawite are literally fighting for their lives. Much of the fighting is about the attempts by HTS, the present rulers to confiscate weapons.The Alawites are resisting and there are pockets of resistance in the South where there are local Druze militias.
HTS is spread thinly on the ground. They are facing problems in asserting themselves. Although they had a walkover against the Syrian army, they never actually had to do much fighting. I would guess they only have about 30,000 fighting men and spread across Syria, that is not a lot. There’s an important pocket of resistance in the Northeast where the Kurds are. The Kurdish American allies are resisting. The so-called Syrian National Army, which is a front for the Turkish army, may go into a fully fledged war against the Kurdish forces. But that’s going to depend partly on what happens after the inauguration of the new US president, how Trump deals with the situation.
RS: What are you hearing from people in Syria?
Peter Ford: It is not a pretty story. HTS and their allies have been parading showing their dominance, flying ISIS and Al-Qaeda flags. They have been bullying, intimidating, confiscating and looting. Surrendering Christian as well as Alawite soldiers have been given summary justice, roadside executions being the norm. Christians in their towns and villages are just trying to hunker down and pray. Literally. I’m sorry to say the senior Christian clerics, with one or two noble exceptions, have opted for appeasement and effectively betrayed their communities. The senior leadership at the Orthodox Church, in particular Greek Catholic church, have had themselves photographed with dignitaries of the jihadi regime.
They are turning the other cheek. It’s quite a contrast with the Alawite. But they have no choice. You may remember that the slogan of the jihadi armies during the conflict was, “Christians to Beirut, Alawite to the grave.” HTS is going through the motions of having meetings with clerics and making soothing noises. All the while their henchmen are driving around in trucks flying ISIS flags. What I’m hearing is very depressing.
The regime is leaving the Alawites totally abandoned. You barely read a word in the west in media about the plight of the Alawite and not much more about the Christians.
RS: Western media have demonized Bashar al Assad and even Asma Assad. What was your impression of Bashar and Asma when you met them? What do you think of accusations they accumulated billions of dollars?
Peter Ford: The accusations are completely spurious. I know some members of the Assad family, some of them have lived for many years in Britain. They lived in very modest personal circumstances. If Assad had been a billionaire, like they’re saying, some of that would’ve trickled down. I can guarantee you that has not been the case. These accusations also go against the impressions that I picked up when I was seeing the Assads when I was an ambassador there. They appreciated the good things of life the same as everybody else, but they didn’t come across as the (Ferdinand & Imelda) Marcos-type. Nothing at all like that. It is all lies, made up to serve the deeper agenda.
The media kicking of Bashar and Asma is really distasteful. It’s pointless. He’s disappointed his few remaining followers, although it was unrealistic, I believe, for them to expect more. But the fact is that he ran when others were not able to run, and many of those have been killed, or they’re hiding or they’ve escaped to Lebanon in some cases where they’re also hiding. He did get out with his skin, but to beat up on him as the media are doing is really distasteful and pointless. It is akin to this new genre of political pornography, Assad porn, the torture stories, the hyped up narrative about prison and graves being opened up. Actually, by the way, most of those graves are war dead. They were not people who’d been tortured to death as the media pretends. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the conflict over more than a decade, and many of them were buried in unmarked graves. But the western media are reveling in this new genre of Assad porn.
This is all being whipped up to make Western audiences more accepting of the way the West is getting into bed with Al-Qaeda. The more they demonize Assad and harp on the misdeeds of the Assad regime, and the more likely we are to swallow and be distracted away from the hideous atrocities being carried out right now.
Western leaders are kissing the feet of a guy who’s still a wanted terrorist and who has been a founder member of ISIS for God’s sake, as well as a founder member of Al-Qaeda in Syria. It is morally distasteful and shaming.
Jolani needs the west desperately now. Otherwise, he will face the same fate as Bashar Assad. If the economy continues on its trajectory of the years, then Jolani will be dead meat in fairly short order. He has to deliver massive rapid economic improvement to survive as leader. And this is what it’s all about. His strategy, obviously, is to milk his status as a puppet of the West in order to secure not just reconstruction aid, but that’s for the long term, but more immediately sanctions relief, the electricity flowing again, the oil.
Let’s not forget that the oil and gas of Syria is still effectively in the hands of the United States, which through its Kurdish puppets, controls a segment of the economy, which used to be worth, I think, 20% of serious GDP and provide essential oil for fuel, cooking, everything. He’s got to get his hands on that and get sanctions lifted. That’s what so much of it is about. But he has one major problem: Israel. Israel’s not buying it. Israel is the exception. All the western front is tumbling over itself to go and kiss the feet of the sultan of Damascus. But the Israelis are sucking their teeth, saying they don’t trust the guy.
Israel is destroying the remnants of the Syrian army and its infrastructure. Meanwhile they grab more Syrian land. They want to keep Syria on its knees indefinitely by insisting that Western sanctions not be lifted. I sense there’s a battle royal going on in Washington between what we might call the deep state, which would favor lifting sanctions and the Israel lobby, which is resisting that for selfish Israeli reasons. Given that the Israeli lobby wins these tussles nine times out of 10 , the outlook may not be that great for the Jolani regime.
RS: What are your hopes and fears for Syria? What’s the nightmare scenario and what’s the best possible?
Peter Ford: I’m very pessimistic. It is very hard to see a silver lining in what has happened. Syria has been taken off the table as a Middle East player. The old Syria has died effectively. Syria was the last man standing among the Arab countries that supported the Palestinians. There was no other. There were militias like Hezbollah plus Yemen but there were no states other than Syria. Syria is now gone, and the jihadis are saying, telling the world they don’t care. By the way, this is an example of how the Israelis will not take yes for an answer. The jihadis keep telling the world, “We love Israel. We don’t care about the Palestinians. Please accept us. We love you.” And the Israelis won’t take yes for an answer.
The best hope for the Syrian people is that they may get some respite. It is possible to imagine a scenario where the Syrian people are able to recover, at least economically a scenario under which sanctions are lifted, under which Syria, the central government recovers control of its oil and grain, where fighting has stopped, where it doesn’t have to pay anything to keep up an army because it’s not trying. They might be able to put everything into reconstruction.
So it is possible to imagine a scenario where Syria loses its soul, but gains more hours of electricity. That is possibly the most likely scenario. But there are major obstacles as we discussed, Israel standing in the way of sanctions, lifting pockets of resistance in discipline among the jihadi ranks, Turkey rampaging against the Kurds and ISIS which is still not a completely spent force. So the outlook is obviously cloudy. We should take stock in a month’s time when we see the early days of the new regime in Washington on which so much will depend.
RS: In Trump’s first term he tried to remove all US troops from east Syria but his efforts were ignored. Perhaps that could have made a big difference?
Peter Ford: Yes, it could have been a total game changer. If Syria had access to its oil, it wouldn’t have had the fuel problem, the electricity problem. It could have changed the history of the region.
Now, the US is increasing the number of soldiers and bases in Syria. And they recently assassinated a ISIS leader which might have played a role in sparking the recent terrorist attack in the US. All of this makes it much harder now for Trump to withdraw US forces because it will seen as a retreat, a reward for ISIS.
I argued for years that the sanctions were manifestly not working. But in the end they did. It’s like a bridge. It gets undermined and then suddenly it breaks. There was no single cause. It was just the culmination and things reached a tipping point.
Zelensky ‘Ready’ To Hand North Korean POWs To Kim Jong Un
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made an unprecedented offer of a prisoner exchange deal involving North Korea. Over the weekend Zelensky announced that two wounded North Korean soldiers were recovered from the battlefield by Ukrainian forces. He subsequently shared photos of the foreign fighters on social media.
“This was not an easy task: Russian forces and other North Korean military personnel usually execute their wounded to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war against Ukraine,” Zelensky had said on X. Neither Moscow nor Pyongyang have yet to acknowledge that North Korean troops have been captured or killed.
Zelensky indicated he authorized the SBU intelligence service to give reporters access to the two POWs because the “world needs to know the truth about what is happening.”
Zelensky’s new offer came Sunday. He said on X:
“Ukraine is ready to hand over Kim Jong Un’s soldiers to him if he can organize their exchange for our warriors who are being held captive in Russia.”
It marked a rare moment of the Ukrainian leader addressing Kim Jong Un directly. Zelensky has vehemently condemned North Korea several times since reports first surfaced that some 10,000 North Korean troops have been sent to help Russian forces.
They are believed to only be operating in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine forces have held territory since a risky cross-border offensive began in early August. Moscow and Pyongyang inked a defense treaty last summer.
Zelensky further asserted there will “undoubtedly be more” North Korean soldiers captured by his forces. For “those North Korean soldiers who do not wish to return, there may be other options available,” said the Ukrainian leder.
North Koreans who want “to bring peace closer by spreading the truth about this war in Korean will be given that opportunity,” he continued.
Zelensky has put out a video of the North Korean POWs being questioned and interrogated, wherein the captive said he’s willing to stay and live in Ukraine…
In addition to the first captured soldiers from North Korea, there will undoubtedly be more. It’s only a matter of time before our troops manage to capture others. There should be no doubt left in the world that the Russian army is dependent on military assistance from North… pic.twitter.com/4RyCfUoHoC
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) January 12, 2025
In this new video featuring the wounded North Korean troops, one of the men said that his commanders “told him it was just training” and that’s how he ended up in Russia and then Ukraine.
Zelensky has further alleged that Russian President Vladimir Putin could not “manage without military support from Pyongyang”—and that’s why he must be reliant on foreign military manpower.
Meanwhile South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, has informed lawmakers in Seoul it believes that some 300 North Korean soldiers have been killed since being transferred to Russia, and around 2,700 others injured.
It was back in August 2019, just about the time Democrats were wasting everyone’s time with the first fake impeachment scandal, when Donald Trump originally introduced the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark.
At the time, the notion was dismissed by the pointy-headed arbiters of right and wrong known as the mainstream media, who concluded that Trump must see his presidency as an extended season of “The Apprentice.” In this episode, the modern-day land baron outsmarts the Scandihoovian rubes who didn’t know the “green” in Greenland was cold hard cash.
Like almost every other preconception of Trump in his first term, that take was nonsensical. There was considerable historical and geo-political justification for Trump’s proposal to rescue Greenland from European colonialism, and perhaps if his enemies had not sprung the Ukraine phone call impeachment hoax shortly after the Greenland gambit was proposed, it might have become a major accomplishment of Trump’s first term.
I wrote about the original proposal on Aug. 26, 2019, for RealClearPolitics in an article that declared “Trump’s No Safe Bet; He’s a Leader.” The premise was that unlike the feckless, washed-out, safety-in-numbers politicians who lead by following polls, Trump used common sense and intuition to find solutions to problems no one else even liked to think about. Building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants might seem like an obvious idea now, but before Trump, no one would have dared to say it.
The same is true of his wish to reclaim Greenland as North American territory. Few if any of Trump’s contemporaries had considered the idea, but it was not without precedent. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward had sought to purchase Greenland for the United States in 1867, the same year he famously acquired Alaska from Russia.
These days, it may seem jarring to talk about buying large chunks of real estate for the purpose of national aggrandizement, but it wasn’t always so. In addition to Seward’s purchase of Alaska, the United States also can be grateful for Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which nearly doubled the size of the country, as well as for the largely free acquisition of Florida from Spain. Land deals are not just in Trump’s blood; they are part of our national heritage.
They can also be vital to national security. Certainly everyone can agree we were infinitely better off during the era of the Soviet Union because Alaska was no longer in the hands of the Russian oligarchs. And President-elect Trump alluded to a similar benefit on Truth Social when he appointed his ambassador to Denmark in December:
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”
Trump elaborated on that sentiment last week during his impromptu press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes. … People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That’s for the free world. I’m talking about protecting the free world. You don’t even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place. You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen. We’re not letting it happen.”
So again, we have the Russian threat, but this time added on top of the perhaps even greater Chinese threat. As I pointed out five years ago, China has its own eyes on Greenland, not just for the strategic importance but because it is a repository of rare earth minerals and other resources:
“President Trump was well aware that the Chinese had already expressed their own interest in Greenland, offering to fund millions of dollars of infrastructure improvements on the island as part of the plan for global economic domination known as the ‘Belt and Road Initiative.’”
Fortunately, pressure on Denmark largely thwarted China’s Greenland ambitions, but meanwhile Trump’s appetite for American expansionism was whetted.
It is perhaps significant that the play for Greenland has been paired with Trump’s threat to take back the Panama Canal, which was turned over to the nation of Panama by Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. The canal zone, after all, has proven to be a lucrative foothold for China in the New World, and provides a chilling warning of what might happen if someone of Trump’s stature did not step forward to hold the communist state out of Greenland.
And one thing is certain. No one is laughing at Trump this time around for his pitch to Denmark. Far-fetched? Maybe, but no one dares to underestimate Trump any longer. His willpower is a force of nature, and if he says he wants Greenland, don’t count him out.
Trump has already become the dominant force on the world stage weeks before he takes office. His attendance at the reopening of Notre Dame caused ripples throughout Europe. Mexico and Canada were put on notice that there was no more free ride once Trump took office, as he threatened them both with tariffs. Trump’s jest about making Canada the 51st state deserves a lot of the credit for (Governor?) Justin Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister. And that’s just the beginning.
But after the fact he was forced to acknowledge that Trump’s election would lead to “a giant renovation of government and the domestic order aimed at making it run more efficiently” and that China would be “widely considered the United States’ single greatest threat.”
Although Dalio is nostalgic for the post-war international order, he recognizes that under the new rules, “The U.S. and China will be competing for allies, with China generally believed to be in a much better position to win over nonaligned countries because China is more important economically and does a better job exerting its soft power.”
Unless you are a secret admirer of Xi Jinping, that assessment makes the best case for why Donald Trump is the right person for the job of restoring American dominance. No one does a better job of exerting “soft power” than the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president. He has already changed the conversation just with a social media post and a press conference. So what happens when he gets in office?
I’m not the only one taking Trump seriously. So are both Republicans and Democrats.
Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat, for instance, said, “I do think it’s a responsible conversation if they [Denmark] were open to [the United States] acquiring it, you know, whether just buying it outright. If anyone thinks that’s bonkers, it’s like, well, remember the Louisiana Purchase.”
And MAGA superstar Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, accompanied Donald Trump Jr. to Nuuk, Greenland, last week to test the waters for Making Greenland America Again.
“What we learned is a couple of things,” he told his huge YouTube audience. “Number one, the people of Greenland are awesome. They’re tough people, they have tough winters. They’ve been through a lot and they feel forgotten, but they are the most lovely people. Number two, they feel as if they’re mistreated right now by the Danish government, that the Danish government is not treating them the way they’d like to be treated, and they want to be wealthy again.”
In just one week, the real work begins after Trump is sworn in. There’s no guarantee that he will accomplish his goal of buying Greenland, but with his salesmanship, one thing is certain – it’s more likely that Greenland will become the 51st state than that Canada will.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His book “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA and on X/Gettr @HeartlandDiary.
Tensions at the Southern Border are on the rise just days before President Trump takes office.
Last week, the captain and first mate of a Mexican fishing boat are in federal custody after brawling with U.S. Coast Guard members attempting to board their vessel, according to Border Report.
The clash occurred last Sunday off San Diego’s Mission Bay after a federal Joint Operations Center in Imperial Beach flagged the boat as suspicious.
The boat, with six occupants and an “excessive number” of fishing poles, was under surveillance by U.S. Border Patrol near Dana Launch. Agents observed four passengers disembarking, later identified as Mexican migrants. They were instructed to sit on the pier while agents searched for the boat’s operators.
The Border Report article says agents spotted two individuals hiding near public restrooms, but the pair fled back to the boat, quickly unmooring and escaping before they could be apprehended.
The Joint Operations Center tracked the boat remotely and dispatched a U.S. Coast Guard vessel to intercept it. About 20 minutes later, the Coast Guard caught up, using emergency lights and loudspeakers to order the boat to stop.
Instead of complying, the boat rammed the Coast Guard vessel, and its two occupants began hurling metal objects at crew members. The Coast Guard disabled the boat’s engines with machine gun fire and used pepper ball projectiles to subdue the suspects.
Coast Guard members boarded the boat, subdued the non-compliant suspects with pepper spray, and placed them in handcuffs. Oscar Eduardo Audelo Rodriguez and Francisco Brado Cota were taken to Naval Base Point Loma for medical evaluation and released the same day.
The pair declined to explain their actions or involvement with the migrants. According to court documents, three of the four migrants identified Audelo as the captain and Brado as the first mate, stating they paid $7,000 to $16,000 each to be smuggled into the U.S.
Audelo and Brado remain in custody, facing charges of smuggling migrants for profit. A detention hearing is scheduled for next week, the report says.
People who displayed a “Keep New England White” banner from a highway overpass in July 2022 did not violate state law because they did not appear to know they were trespassing, New Hampshire’s top court has ruled.
New Hampshire law RSA 354-B:1 states in part that a person violates the rights of others when that person inflicts damage, threatens to inflict damage, or trespasses on property “when such actual or threatened conduct is motivated by race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or disability.”
State officials brought civil claims against the members of the Nationalist Social Club, also known as NSC-131, who unfurled the banner on July 30, 2022, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, contending they violated the law because their actions were motivated by race and interfered with the lawful activities of others.
A trial court dismissed the case after finding the state civil rights law was unconstitutionally overbroad. An appeal placed the case in front of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
The justices, in a unanimous opinion handed down on Jan. 10, upheld the lower court ruling.
“The overbreadth of the State’s construction of the Act creates an unacceptable risk of a chill on speech protected by Part I, Article 22 of our State Constitution. Specifically, the State’s construction of the Act would impose government sanctions on those who unintentionally trespass on public property and whose presence is ’motivated by’ one of the characteristics enumerated in RSA 354-B:1,” the justices wrote in a per curiam opinion. “Such a broad sweep discourages the expression of certain messages for fear of government sanctions under the Act based on the content of the messages expressed.”
It’s also not reasonable to allow charges to be brought against people who don’t appear to know they are trespassing, the justices stated. They ruled that state officials must establish that people are knowingly trespassing and noted that officials did not do so in the case against Christopher Hood and the other members of the group that took credit for displaying the banners.
The top court’s wrote in its opinion that Hood was not wearing a mask, spoke to police officers on the scene, and identified himself as the group’s leader. The group removed the banner and other banners when they were told that they were trespassing on public property.
“Even when construing all reasonable inferences in the light most favorable to the State, we are not persuaded that the complaints sufficiently allege that the defendants knowingly trespassed,” the justices ruled.
The attorney general’s office said it was disappointed by the court’s decision but respects it, spokesperson Michael Garrity said in a statement.
“Our office remains steadfast in enforcing the Civil Rights Act to ensure all Granite Staters are free from discrimination, violence, and hate-motivated threats,” Garrity stated. “We will continue to explore all options to protect the rights and safety of our communities.”
William Gens, a lawyer representing the group, said its members were “very pleased with the decision.”
“It was based on grounds that we raised all along,” he said, adding that the attorney general’s interpretation “didn’t give adequate notice to the public as to what conduct, including the speech portion of the conduct, was a violation of the statute.”
A second complaint filed against the group by the attorney general’s office is pending. It accuses the group of violations relating to a demonstration outside a Concord, New Hampshire café that hosted a drag story hour event.
Starbucks Reverses Open Public Bathroom Policy After Junkie Influx Created Unsafe Environment
Newly appointed Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has reportedly reversed a seven-year policy that allowed the general public to use store bathrooms without making a purchase. The policy had resulted in widespread drug use at certain store locations, particularly in lawless, Democrat-controlled cities.
The Wall Street Journal obtained a copy of a memo sent to employees outlining the new code of conduct being rolled out across stores in North America.
“There is a need to reset expectations for how our spaces should be used and who uses them,” Starbucks North America President Sara Trilling said in the memo.
The updated policies also include adding signs prohibiting harassment, violence, threatening language, outside alcohol, smoking, and panhandling in its stores.
In 2018, former CEO Howard Schultz transformed Starbucks into America’s “largest public restroom” by allowing non-customers to use the chain’s bathrooms across thousands of US stores.
Ensuring safety with new bathroom policies is just part of Niccol’s turnaround strategy to save the struggling coffee chain, which has suffered from three straight quarters of declining sales.
A federal judge has cleared the way for the public release of volume one of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on investigations involving President-elect Donald Trump while opting to keep volume two of the report restricted.
Volume one pertains to Smith’s election interference case against Trump, while volume two relates to the classified documents case.
In a Jan. 13 order, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon partially denied an emergency motion by two Trump co-defendants—Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira—to block the public release of the report. Nauta and De Oliveira had filed an emergency motion seeking to prevent the release of both volumes of Smith’s report, citing concerns that it would prejudice their pretrial rights.
Cannon upheld their request to restrict volume two—pertaining to a classified documents probe involving Trump in which Nauta and De Oliveira are co-defendants. The judge noted that release of volume two would be “inconsistent” with the defendants’ right to a fair trial.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) had argued that selective release of volume two to congressional leaders was in the public interest but stopped short of advocating for broader dissemination. Nauta and De Oliveira had argued that releasing the volume, even in a limited capacity, could irreparably damage their legal standing.
Cannon scheduled a hearing for Jan. 17 to address the DOJ’s request for limited disclosure of volume two to congressional leaders while withholding it from the public.
“Release of Volume II, even on a limited basis as promised by the United States, risks irreversibly and substantially impairing the legal rights of Defendants in this criminal proceeding,” Cannon wrote. “The Court is not willing to make that gamble on the basis of generalized interest by members of Congress, at least not without full briefing and a hearing on the subject.”
The judge noted that a portion of the hearing may need to be conducted under seal to prevent parts of volume two from being disseminated to the public.
However, Cannon agreed with the DOJ’s position that volume one contained no substantive references to the defendants or the classified documents case. Noting that there was “insufficient basis” to restrict the public release of volume one, Cannon cleared the way for its public release.
After Trump won the presidential election, Smith moved to dismiss the classified documents case and the election interference case against Trump, citing DOJ rules around not prosecuting presidents. The motions to dismiss were made “without prejudice,” meaning charges could be refiled after Trump finishes his second term as president. However, the statute of limitations and the prospect of Trump pardoning himself stand in the way of potential re-prosecution.
Federal law requires special counsels to prepare a final report outlining their prosecution decisions and submit it to the attorney general, who has the discretion to determine whether the report will be made public.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said last week that both volumes of Smith’s final report would be made public when the courts give it the green light.
Smith, who was appointed by Garland to investigate Trump in the two cases—election interference and classified documents—resigned from the DOJ on Jan. 10. Smith’s resignation marks the end of his criminal prosecutions of Trump over the past two years or so.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in the cases has repeatedly described the prosecutions as politically motivated.
