It’s come to this: “Catholic members of the US armed forces could in good conscience consider disobeying orders to attack Greenland if such orders were issued, according to Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the bishop responsible for the pastoral care of US military personnel.”

I’m taking lots of comfort from the fact that, today, not many people could tell you who Westbrook Pegler was.

The Norwegian government is staying fairly quiet for now, but as a sign of the shifting vibe here the former head of Norway’s armed forces has come out and called the US a “neo-fascist banana republic” and a “hostile great power without norms”. www.dn.no/politikk/tid...

Quick, short post on the newsletter: MLK in Chester, PA. by.brianralexander.com/mlk-in-chest...

first we came for football with Taylor swift, then we came for hockey with heated rivalry, next we’ll come for baseball with the 7th inning espresso martini break

The study found that only about 4% of the tariff burden is shouldered by foreign firms, with a “near-complete” pass-through of 96% to US buyers.

The Greenland nonsense should prompt Europe to use the nuclear option: they should threaten to stop honoring U.S. patents and copyrights. That would quickly educate Trump backers like Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg cepr.net/publications...

This is probably the most accurate description. Someone in their mid-50s today told me that this is the first time he had thought about or been affected by politics. And that guy is actively guarding buildings and his coworkers from ICE.

Here is news. Declaring for the millionth time Trump is unfit is not news.

Oof.

Gabriel Zucman on the shocking concentration of extreme wealth in the United States…. gzucman.substack.com?r=nle0&utm_c...

When USSR invaded Afghanistan we boycotted Olympics. Why is the rest of the world coming here for World Cup?

Happy MLK Day. In commemoration, here’s the story of how the NYT Magazine assigned Martin Luther King to write “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and then blew its chance to publish it through the sort of pompous editorial dithering every freelancer knows all too well. newrepublic.com/article/1117...

New post up on By.BrianRAlexander.com Pretty strong echo between Springfield, Ohio and Minnesota right now. History and race, lynching and refuge, and JD Vance trying to recreate the bad old days. (Still free!)

One thing I’ve learned about having a newsletter: I need a copy editor.

To borrow from Jimmy Breslin, Bovino is a small Italian man in search of a balcony.

New post up on By.BrianRAlexander.com Pretty strong echo between Springfield, Ohio and Minnesota right now. History and race, lynching and refuge, and JD Vance trying to recreate the bad old days. (Still free!)

ICE has people staying at the Intercontinental? Good to know our tax dollars are supporting luxury hotel stays.

It’s ironic that they’re like “if we do ethnic cleansing we’ll have a high trust neighborly society” and then Minneapolis is literally doing high trust neighborly society and they’re like nooooo

The retaliation measures are being drawn up to give European leaders leverage in pivotal meetings with the US president at the World Economic Forum in Davos. ft.trib.al/aKexyt2

“It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. ‘Surely,’ you say to yourself, ‘things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.’” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/o...

This is what the Midwest Lutherans heard this morning and are hopefully tying to Minnesota

Scott Bessent is the perfect example (as if you needed more examples) of how many Wall Street guys think they are geniuses because they got rich, when, in fact, they're clueless morons about everything except engineerng money. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Boy, Airbnb sure is afraid of San Diego voters. They're running ads against a city tax almost continously. The ad is full of lies, though, and I think San Diegans will see through them.

Anybody on this board is a collaborator. And it's especially rich given Greenland. The average neighborhood person in Minneapolis has more honor and backbone than these so-called VIPs. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/w...

I was quite confidently assured by no less a personage than Brett Kavanaugh that US citizens would be released from questioning after only a few minutes. #KavanaughStop

She blasphemes that cross every day.

The coyotes in my canyon have become like unruly college sophomores. Partying at 5AM. I thought we had a deal: no raves after midnight.

In sum, Europe has little to lose in hitting back hard. The hope here is Europe hits back hard and prompts Trump to deescalate, just as he has done on China. Thus by escalating Europe is also creating a pathway to deescalate this crisis.

Trump tariffing countries over Greenland is a test. If Europe just swallows it and tries to move on, it increases the odds of the WH thinking it can seize Greenland without consequences. Europe therefore has to respond. Euro publics have had enough and want their leaders to push back 2/

What European leaders have been most nervous about is the US pulling back on NATO or Ukraine… but how can Europe trust the US will come to its defense if its trying to seize territory from a NATO country. They can’t. So why cave to keep a security commitment that is not real. 6/

Over 20 years, Peter Thiel quietly turned his Roth IRA into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, the billionaire took a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall. (Published 2021)

will Europe actually get their shit together building EU-based replacements for US big tech internet platforms?

Huh!

Our Somali-American neighbors are under white supremacist ideological attack from POTUS & gang Many Minnesotans are under feds' lawless physical & economic attacks. I've never seen anything at this scale 🧵 & I've never seen a community act up together this way either bsky.app/profile/aaro...

jd vance would sell his *own* children for a percocet if he thought it would get him closer to the presidency

Now, NOW? will the Big Shot press finally say what is obvious? That Trump is a loon? There’s a crazy person masquerading as the president of the United States and far too many people who should know better are gaming out political strategy scenarios.

Stand strong, Europe.

it is funny how many people affiliated with the secret police have had to say "stop making fun of the secret police, the guy in the tac vest that covers him like a training bra is a hero, he tracked down and subdued two hospice orderlies using only the W-2 forms they file annually"

Trump sure is proving to be the enemy of business. Especially small business.

Trump announces tariffs on UK, France, Germany, and other NATO countries, accusing them of having "journeyed to Greenland, for purposes unknown," creating "a very dangerous situation." He demands Greenland. He is manifestly insane and will start a cold or hot war with NATO unless Congress steps in.

New tariff just dropped. Americans set to pay an additional 10% tax on all goods from Germany, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. It starts in two weeks, rising to 25% by June. (Aside: A trade war with one EU country is a trade war with the entire EU).

They desperately need you to use AI. You can say no. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/17/b...

Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another Photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

Man, Du Bois had some bangers, but for me, it doesn't get much better than his scathing indictment of the "Christianity" of the United States. Certainly this was all true of the nation in his lifetime. But in my lifetime, his criticisms have never felt so true of the nation right now.

surely this isn't the thing that absolute laypersons and homebodies such as myself have been explaining in painstaking detail for the last 2+ years

Again, why aren’t Jeffries, Schumer, senators and congress people not there facing the danger? John Lewis would be.

RFK Jr. racking up the wins

Ohio GOP U.S. Sen. Jon Husted has taken at least $75,000 in campaign contributions from Centene, including more than $29,000 after the company paid $88.3 million to settle allegations that it had fraudulently extracted tens of millions from Ohio Medicaid ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/01/16/h...