Around Our Network

President Donald Trump dropped a stunning new excuse for why the United States should take over Greenland Friday.

Trump was meeting with American oil executives over the military incursion of Venezuela and his goals to shift the country's oil production to benefit the U.S. when a reporter asked about Venezuela and if the country would be considered an ally.

"Right now they seem to be an ally and I think it'll continue to be an ally," Trump said. "We don't want to have Russia there. We don't want to have China there. And by the way, we don't want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don't take Greenland, you're going to have Russia or China as your next door neighbor. That's not going to happen."

An analyst Wednesday described how the ICE attacks in Minneapolis and deadly shooting of Renee Good were all prompted by a MAGA influencer "chasing clicks" — and showed the potentially grim future of MAGA journalism.

The Bulwark's Andrew Egger revealed how MAGA influencer Nick Shirley's "highly misleading gonzo video" led to the chaos in Minnesota. Shirley was confronting workers at Somali-run daycares and health care centers over claims of fraud in a now-viral video created unfounded allegations that spurred into a new campaign under the Trump administration to target the Somali community.

"Within days, the White House was surging immigration enforcement to Minneapolis; Vice President JD Vance said Shirley had 'done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer] prizes,'" Egger wrote.

"If this sort of person doing this sort of work can be so richly rewarded on the right right now, it’s safe to say both that Shirley will be a major fixture of the online right for a while, and that many others will try to follow in his footsteps," Egger added. "But if he’s the future of right-wing journalism, the future is very bleak indeed."

In the past, and in traditional media, Shirley would have had oversight or rules to abide by. But that's not the case now.

"Much of the old press model has collapsed entirely, especially on the right," Eggers wrote. "Guys like Nick Shirley aren’t trying to join a publication, they’re picking up a camera and trying to go viral on their own. They have no safety net, no sounding board, no mentorship, no way to grow beyond what they’re doing this minute. All they have is the zero-sum game of the algorithm: Get noticed or die. Of course they’re going to do what the algorithm demands—which, on today’s right, means snappy, confrontational, fact-agnostic propaganda for the regime. That’s what the ecosystem rewards, so we’re going to get more and more of it. If you think that’s grim today, wait till you see the future."