Tag: denmark
I Dream of Greenland

Why Greenland Became The Ultimate Fascist Dreamscape

Ever since Don Jr. and his “Trump Force One” team of bobblehead doll righties landed at Nuuk Airport a day after the fourth anniversary of January 6, we’ve all been scratching our heads. It’s hard for normies like us to comprehend the deranged, anachronistic white supremacist lunacy behind the Greenland fantasy. Yes, there’s the newly melted Arctic and its soon-to-be-contested waterways, yes, there are rare earth minerals, and yes, it’s sparsely inhabited by indigenous people that Trump and MAGA seem to regard as lower races.

But going to the mat for it, with Trump browbeating and insulting the prime minister of Denmark? JD Vance flying over uninvited with his wife by his side? During my process of researching a long article for New York magazine about Donald Trump Jr., it became clear that the Greenland play is, on one level, a giant dog whistle to the white fascist extremist base.

Greenland has been – for decades – a neo-Nazi fantasy. Julius Evola, a mid-20th-century Italian philosopher and now “the internet’s favorite fascist,” proposed Greenland as “the primordial homeland of a highly civilized prehistoric white race … sufficiently civilized to be conceived as ‘divine’ by the ancients.” (Evola’s explanation for how these divines could morph into actual non-white indigenous inhabitants is that their divinity was perhaps diluted by, you guessed it, breeding with lower orders.)

The online intellectual fascist influencers followed and amplified by Vance, Junior, Musk, Marc Andreessen, and countless Trump administration minions (who we have covered in previous Freakshows) are deeply attached to this mythology.

An anon called Plethonist (who seems to have now deleted his X account after we started writing about fascist Xitter) writes in an online white supremacist-friendly rag called IM1776. The magazine is published by The Arts & Literature Foundation, an outfit that bills itself as the “leading publication of the New Right.” It is housed in the same building near Capitol Hill as other hard-right, well-funded conservative outfits, including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the extreme Zionist Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and ironically, was home to far-right Liberty Lobby (founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto). Its editor-at-large writes and tweets under the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Here is Plethonist in IM1776 waxing hysterically Rudyard Kipling about Greenland, a month before Trump started to publicly lay claim to it:

“Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.” (Palingenesis is an ultranationalist concept of racist rebirth.)

Don Jr.’s pal Jack “Jack P” Posobiec wasn’t on the trip to Greenland, but he was definitely in on the joke. Two days before Christmas and more than two weeks before Junior and his posse landed in Nuuk, he posted on Xitter a long letter to Greenlanders which reads in part:

“Dear Honored Residents of Greenland, Imagine a Greenland where the promise of your land's vast potential is not just a dream but a reality. A Greenland where your children can dream bigger, your economy can grow stronger, and your voice can resonate louder on the world stage. This vision can become your reality by joining the United States of America.”

Posobiec (who has called Democrats and progressives “unhumans” and named dictators as political role models) has been grifting off Trumpism since 2016. The longtime neo-Nazi collaborator is so highly regarded among Trump cabinet members that Treasury Secretary Bessent invited him to Ukraine. Hegseth reportedly wanted to bring him to Europe (but Posobiec, clearly a man in demand, declined the latter invitation).

On Xitter, extreme right Passage Press publisher Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman amused himself after Junior’s visit by proposing that sacked DEI federal employees could be sent to Greenland to mine rare earth minerals. (America’s Siberia, for now, appears to be ICE’s swamp gulag in Louisiana.).

Another Greenland dreamer is Dryden Brown, a Peter Thiel acolyte, who designs for building utopian cities for the tech elites in a project called Praxis and who was covered rather fawningly not long ago in the New York Times.

Brown was moved to advertise his own white nation fantasies the same day Junior landed in Greenland, in a giddy tweet that included a map (see below) of a new American empire encompassing all the white-led nations on the planet.

For a while after Junior’s expeditionary assault, MAGA tried to claim Greenlanders really want America to invade (which is a lie). Of course, what Greenlanders might actually want is of no real concern to men seeking a new homeland from which to “re-breed” Aryans.

In his Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth, Yale historian Greg Grandin proposed that Trumpism, and the big beautiful border wall of the first MAGA regime specifically, signaled the end of the nation’s founding ethos. He proposed that only endless expansion had kept the violence at the heart of the American experiment at bay. Now, with the oil wars lost and the nation too broke to conquer farther frontiers, we were shut in together, with no steam valve for the hate.

A white nationalist beachhead in Greenland buys more time for us, perhaps.

The fantasy is one-half X-Box sword-wielding hero homunculus and one-half emulation of Hitler – the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. The bros read their Tolkien. Their thumbs were weaned on the controllers moving heroic medieval knights and sorcerers. For the Millennial fascists in Junior’s set, Greenland promises manly ardors and challenges where a new race might emerge from the chrysalis of the 21st-century American Everyman, waddling between SUV and front door with a Diet Coke in hand.

Donald Trump might be a vulgar marketer of money-laundering condos and cheesy merch – but when they squint, he’s the vessel by which the white philosopher-priests that inhabited Hyperborea might return.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER'S American Freakshow.


After Threats And Taunts, Trump Is Begging Denmark For...Eggs

After Threats And Taunts, Trump Is Begging Denmark For...Eggs

Donald Trump is shameless.

He was barely minted as the new president when for some unfathomable reason decided to threaten Denmark over Greenland, demanding the Nordic country sell the semi-desolate island for … reasons. (Likely because it inaccurately looks really bigon a map.)

It was part of a pattern that continues to this day—threatening Canada’s annexation and calling its prime minister “governor,” threatening to retake the Panama Canal, threatening military action against Mexico, and imposing tariffs on allies like Taiwan, Japan, and the European Union.

Now Trump suddenly finds himself in a bind, having promised lower prices on Day 1, yet seeing grocery prices rise even before many of his tariffs have kicked in. And center stage in the grocery drama are eggs, which have skyrocketed in price … if you can even find them.

And it turns out, telling people to “shut up about egg prices” isn’t the best politics.

So he has asked Denmark and other countries for help.

You can hear them laughing from across the Atlantic.

Yle, Finland’s national public broadcasting company, reported that Finland (diplomatically) refused a similar request. Other European countries are off the table because they don’t wash their eggs (which is why in places like Germany and France, eggs aren’t refrigerated in grocery stores). But even if they could export to the U.S., maybe they’d give the middle finger as well.

The Netherlands, one of the few that can, had their license revoked in January. The Trump administration is trying to reverse the licensing issue, but even then, eggs are fragile. Flying them across the Atlantic is not a logistically simple matter.

You know who might have eggs to help out? Canada. Oops.

But Trump’s insufferably bullying behavior shouldn’t lead to an automatic “no” from potential egg exporters. Perhaps they could take a page from Trump’s ritual humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and force Trump to show up, demand he apologize, interrupt his every word with “YOU DON’T HAVE THE CARDS!” and heap insult upon insult.

Maybe then, and only then, should these countries release eggs into the U.S.

Why Are We Doing Less For Ukraine's Defense Than Tiny Denmark?

Why Are We Doing Less For Ukraine's Defense Than Tiny Denmark?

A little under two months ago, tiny Denmark – with a population less than that of New York City and a GDP of $400 billion – committed its “entire artillery” to Ukraine. “The Ukrainians are asking us for ammunition now. Artillery now. From the Danish side, we decided to donate our entire artillery,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the Munich Security Conference on February 18.

How did we, the richest, most powerful nation in the world, become the country that is turning its back on Ukraine? I’m using the royal “we” here, but you know who I’m talking about: the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, who ordered House Republicans not to bring up for a vote the Senate’s $95 billion aid package for Ukraine and Israel, which has been moldering on Capitol Hill for nearly two months since the Senate passed it on a bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. Trump was said not to want a bipartisan victory for Biden in an election year, so he picked up the phone and called his poodles in the House and killed a potential deal to bring the Senate bill to the floor where it was expected to pass.

Look at this headline in Sunday’s print edition of the New York Times: “Low on Ammunition, Ukraine Is Ill Equipped to Stop Russian Push.” The story describes a 155 mm howitzer position in Eastern Ukraine where Russia has recently made gains on the ground. The crew of the howitzer had a stock of 33 rounds of ammunition when they received an order to fire on a target. Moments later, they had 16 rounds left. “Artillery decides battles,” said Capt. Vladyslav Slominsky, the commander of the battery with the howitzer that was down to only 16 rounds of ammunition. “Who has more wins.”

The artillery is a proud branch in the United States military. They call their branch “The Queen of Battle” because of the firepower that can be brought to bear on the enemy at a moment’s notice. The war that Ukraine has fought against Russia since the 600 mile front line settled into existence late in 2022 has been almost exclusively an artillery war fought with 155 mm howitzers and HIMARS ground-to-ground rockets.

The Russians have more artillery pieces, more rockets, more tanks, and more soldiers, but Ukraine has hung onto the territory they hold, including the parts they took back from Russian forces near Kharkiv and Kherson earlier in the war. Ukraine’s artillery is said to be more accurate and efficient than Russia’s, which wasted tens of thousands of shells firing wildly into the flat agricultural fields of Eastern Ukraine early in 2023 after the front lines stalemated.

Once Russia began its campaign to take individual towns in Eastern Ukraine such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka, their artillery became more accurate. Given small towns as targets, Russian artillery sat back and simply flattened the towns with tens of thousands of artillery rounds, eventually leaving Ukrainian forces no place left to defend, so they pulled back. Now Russia has claimed to have taken the tiny village of Vodayne, about five miles east of Donetsk and a few miles south of Avdiivka. Tactically, it is yet another redoubt that Ukraine had hung onto as the country continues to defend its eastern flank. Strategically, it is not large enough to be significant.

What is significant, however, is why the village was lost: dwindling ammunition stocks.

The Times quoted Swedish military analyst Johan Norberg saying, “You cannot expect people to fight without ammunition.” But you don’t have to interview an expert to know that armies without bullets cease to be armies and turn into targets.

Vladimir Putin knows this like he knows his own name. Even Donald Trump has seen enough gangster movies to know that when you run out of ammo, you get killed. That’s probably why Trump has leaned on House Republicans not to pass the Ukraine aid bill. If Ukraine runs out of ammunition, and Russia starts winning its war on Ukraine, it will make Trump’s pal Putin happy, and the Russian victories will happen on Joe Biden’s watch. In politics, that is called a win-win.

But it’s a lose-lose not only for Ukraine, but for America’s standing in the world as a bulwark against the kind of totalitarian aggression Russia has brought to bear on its neighbor. Russia could not assert its influence over Ukraine by installing puppet presidents like Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian politician Paul Manafort helped to put in power in 2010. Yanukovych proceeded to loot Ukraine by installing cronies from the region of eastern Ukraine with a large Russian-speaking population, the Donbas. Nearly 50 percent of the economic development budget for the entirety of Ukraine went to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions under Yanukovych.

When he was overthrown in 2014, Putin invaded and occupied Crimea and probably began his plans to militarily invade and seize all of Ukraine. Yanukovych, naturally, fled to Russia, where he still resides. And Paul Manafort, who ran Trump’s campaign in 2016, is said to be in talks to take a prominent position in the current Trump campaign.

What has stood between Putin’s ambitions and Ukraine’s existence is the United States and NATO. Now Donald Trump appears to be running on a platform of turning Ukraine over to Putin and getting the United States out of the NATO alliance, which just last week celebrated its 75th anniversary.

How did we get here? How is it that this corrupt man facing four separate criminal indictments in three different jurisdictions has been able to nearly singlehandedly stymie this country’s ability to help the rest of NATO defeat Putin’s fascistic attempt to take over Ukraine? Why do these Republicans even bother to run for Congress, unless all they really want to do is follow the orders of this man who is weakening the United States with every breath he takes?

What has happened to us? Who are we?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Trump Cancels Denmark Trip While Ranting About Obama

Trump Cancels Denmark Trip While Ranting About Obama

 

 

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, responding to President Donald Trump’s offer to purchase Greenland, stressed that the island is not for sale — and Trump responded this week by canceling a trip to Denmark he had planned. Trump has maintained that he believes Frederiksen was being disrespectful, and during a press conference outside the White House on Wednesday, Trump used the cancelation as an excuse to bash former President Barack Obama — telling reporters that foreign countries, including Denmark, cannot get away with the type of disrespect they showed the United States when Obama was in the White House.

Trump told reporters, “I thought that the prime minister’s statement that it was absurd was nasty. I thought it was an inappropriate statement. All she had to do was say, ‘No, we wouldn’t be interested.’”

Trump added, “I thought it was not a nice statement, the way (Frederiksen) blew me off because she’s blowing off the United States. And we’ve done a lot for Denmark…. She shouldn’t treat the United States that way.”

Conservative writer David Frum has a theory on Trump’s decision to cancel his Denmark visit: Trump, Frum told Radio 4, didn’t really cancel because of Denmark’s stand on Greenland, but because he knew Obama planned to visit Denmark next month and feared he would be overshadowed. And Trump was clearly obsessed with Obama during the Wednesday press conference.

Trump claimed that when Obama was president, disrespecting the U.S. was the norm — whereas he demands respect for the U.S.

“President Obama, when they wouldn’t let him land in the Philippines — when they treated him so badly in so many places, the Philippines is one that comes to mind…. They can treat him any way they want to, that’s up to him,” Trump told reporters. “But they can’t treat the United States with the statement ‘how absurd’….Respect has to be shown to the United States.”

Trump went on to address other subjects during the press conference, from gun control to immigration. And he found other reasons to attack Obama, claiming that the policy of separating families at the U.S./Mexico border was instituted under Obama’s watch.

“President Obama had separation,” Trump told reporters. “I’m the one that brought them together….. It was President Obama that had the separation.”

In addition to bashing Obama on immigration, Trump slammed him on Russia policy — claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin got away with more under Obama than it has gotten away with under his presidency.

“Russia outsmarted President Obama,” Trump insisted. “They took over during his term, not during mine. Crimea, they took over Crimea…. President Putin totally outsmarted President Obama on Crimea and other things…. He made a living outsmarting President Obama.”

Watch the videos below:

 

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World