Contents of said letter from daily beast: https://archive.is/YFBK3#selection-773.0-779.748
“Dear Jonas,” the president wrote to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT.”
Someone in my family that’s defended trump tooth and nail since the first term on everythinghas done just told me they oppose what he’s doing to Greenland, and the flood of ICE agents in Minneapolis.
I have never heard them speak a word against Trump. Not ever. And they have argued the craziest shit I’ve ever heard… Like, they think Renee was ‘asking for what she got’ levels of crazy, and that’s after they watched all the videos.
…and they just told me they are now against Trump on these two huge events. This is nuts. I need to go but a lottery ticket or something.
That is wild. I wonder why Greenland would be the tipping point?
Usually conservatives practically swoon at the notion of invading and occupying things, despite all their talk about “America first”, it’s usually really Israel first, Americans dead last, and when it’s time to bomb/invade something, they are balls-deep on the cheer-leading.
As someone with experience with people who are in the MAGA reality bubble, this is because there is no in-canon explanation of Trump’s actions (yet, the story writers patch these up pretty quick). There was no setup for this, no laying the misinformation groundwork and no existing goal that this advances.
Since Greenland wasn’t part of the story, it just came out of nowhere. Lacking any in-MAGA explaination, they are examining this situation as a normal person who knows normal facts and this is completely an unforced error by any measure as anyone can see.
If this was something that was serious and planned then we would have started hearing about this months ago as they started preparing the lies and the misinformation seeding into social media via paid/artificial content creators or otherwise useful idiots. This is probably the strongest indication that Greenland is a distraction and not a real move. This is probably the case with Canada too, in my opinion.
They would rather people talk about anything but the Epstein files and how they are very clearly covering them up and not complying with the law. They don’t want reporters to have time to report on all of the people that he has pardoned who also have made $2-5 million dollar donations to various MAGA PACs, some of them committing even more crimes and getting another pardon…
They need to throw things into the air to distract people. Some of their planned events are polling negative (the Minnesota Invasion, Healthcare Subsidies) and they don’t have anything else so instead we get more random tariffs and more random military threats because they are something that the Executive Branch can do unilaterally and suddenly to ensure that they grab the next news cycle.
This is the “Flood the Zone” tactic that Steve Bannon said that they were using during the first admin.
He did start babbling about it early in his second failed term. And I did see attempts to sanewash this talk about Greenland in places like The Atlantic, for example.
But yeah, the messaging on this has been extremely scattershot.
He talked about buying Greenland as early as his first term. Don’t know if it was major news in USA, but here in Denmark it was pretty big news, mostly because it would literally not make any sense for anyone to sell Greenland. Might as well buy it from Azerbaijan as you might buy it from Denmark.
Basically a DDOS attack on our attention span and journalists capacities
That is it exactly.
Even 24 hour news only has so many seconds of time to put things on the screen and you only have so many hours to try to understand what is happening in the world.
There news gets chopped up into TikTok or Tweet-sized memes which contributes to the distortion (consider a Tweet vs a Last Week Tonight show on any topic), each of those memes are evolved and signal boosted by social media and out the other end of the algorithm pops content that maximally compels your attention which is flavored with the bias from the recommendation algorithm (i.e. What ever bias Elon/Zuck/ByteDance wants to introduce: suppressing Gaza protest coverage, promoting alt-right viewpoints, etc)
Look at the screen time on your phone, what percentage of your day is spent being told what you’re going to read next by an algorithm?
The motivations of the algorithm are not to maximize your understanding or knowledge or tether to reality, they are to make you scroll one more page. People can see how effective large AI systems, like LLMs, can be when deployed at scale.
Recommendation algorithms are also machine learning, but with less pre-IPO hype and they are just as powerful and are deployed at a scale where almost every person on Earth has their world view affected by them.
They have to go or be severely regulated. They can be useful when they recommend you books or movies, but when they’re the gatekeeper of information for the majority of the population then they are informational weapons of mass destruction and should be regulated as such.
Not enough challenge. We “liberate” “armed” countries from their “oppressors” and go into the very bad places and make things “better”
We’re now raiding Sunny Side Daycare. There’s no fairytale there.
Because Greenland is full of white people. If it were full of brown people, especially if they immigrate to the US frequently enough and “steal our jobs”, we might be hearing a different tune.
The population of Greenland is nearly 90% Inuit, you wouldn’t normally class them as “white”.
Shhh….don’t tell the republicans that.
Conservatives seem to oscillate between isolationism and aggressive intervention. They’re both from the stance of American primacy, either using our military for our benefit and to enforce our wishes or saying the world has nothing to offer us we need and that we’re better off not extending effort or energy on the rest of the world.
Currently our conservatives are swinging towards isolationism, which is why the anti immigration rhetoric and pulling out of international organizations was very popular. That’s not compatible with a plan to forcibly annex another country.
Question is, will they still vote Republican if told it’s an entire apparatus that put him in charge or not.
Congratulate your relative for their independent thought and ability to change their mind.
I hope this can be seen as a trend. Maybe there is a high water mark after all.
Besides the letter, what’s the 2nd huge event?