At this writing there have been two fatal shootings of protesters in Minneapolis this week, one by Customs & Border Protection, the other by Immigration & Customs Enforcement. Maybe there will have been more by the time you read this, but we all hope not.
To help quell the increasingly violent confrontations between hundreds of federal agents attempting to arrest criminal illegal aliens on one hand, and thousands of mostly not-illegal-aliens protesting the same on the other, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz decided it was time to activate the National Guard.
Guardspersons were out in force, wearing their distinctive high-viz florescent green “Don’t shoot me, I’m not with them!” vests.
Mr. Walz called out the Guard because: The protesters needed a friendly smile, a cup of hot cocoa charged with sugar and a mug of coffee laden with caffein. It’s not clear what the federal agents needed, apart from cooperation by local authorities, protection by police and a serious reduction in rhetoric that likens them to Nazi storm troopers. Or maybe it was homicidal maniacs.
I get my epithets confused.
I also get my “What was the argument about, anyway?” logic confused. In the context of 80,000 Somali immigrants who have made Minneapolis their new promised land, it is not unlikely that some, maybe many, of said immigrants are present illegally; and it is also probable that a certain percentage of them are violent criminals. Okay… so somebody should move in for arrests.
But there is also the fraud. Some $1 billion, or maybe it was $9 billion, or perhaps $100 billion, have been ripped off from federal and state programs intended to help those who are hungry, or who need daycare, or who have an autistic child in the home, or who simply need a ride to the doctor’s office.
It would seem reasonable that violent criminals should be arrested and locked up; and also that those committing fraud on a grand scale ought to be held to account. But recent in-depth news reports seem to indicate that “organic” street demonstrations protesting arrests are not so organic. The Signal app is apparently widely used across Minneapolis to organize and direct resistance.
(I understand that Signal has a built-in feature that makes screen shots unavailable. This means if you want to gather chat history, you must use a separate device to take a picture of the Signal screen. Makes it much harder, but not impossible, to collect evidence.)
I find it hard to imagine such an organizing effort is due to a sincere love for fellow Minneapolitans who are either criminal or culturally insular or both. There is money at work here someplace. Is it even remotely possible that the well-organized furor over ICE could be about creating diversions from the fraud investigation?
Say it ain’t so!
But here’s an idea: If the hot chocolate and snacks work to calm things down in Minneapolis, maybe the MNG could deploy with their food trucks to Tehran for a short time. If the treats work to good effect where there have been only 2 violent fatalities, maybe they will scale to a place where there have been 36,000.
Might need more donuts to make that work.
Number 3. The Arctic Institute. Why Trump is so focused on Greenland.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, President Trump made many of his opinions clear, as he is wont to do. Foremost among them was his desire to place strategic military installations on Greenland.
As an island, Greenland encompasses 830,000 square miles and is one of most sparsely populated places on the planet. Only 56,000 inhabitants call Greenland home, and most of those are in a temperate zone along the south and west coastlines. Most of the population are indigenous Inuits.
To be sure, Greenland has raw materials much in demand, including uranium and rare earths. But the real value is it’s geographic location between North America and Siberia. To us lower-48 types who usually think east-and-west rather than north-and-south, recognizing the importance of Greenland’s physical position on the globe is only a theoretical acknowledgement. Actually understanding it requires viewing a map of the earth from the top down, as it were.
Seeing a representation of earth from the perspective of, say, the North Star, offers a clear picture of just how close the US, Canada and Russia are to one another. If you consider the ballistic trajectory of a nuclear missile, they are even closer.
The two arms figuratively guarding the gates of North America from Russia are Alaska on the west and Greenland on the east. There is no substitute location anywhere near as strategically important as Greenland.
Trump’s focus on the island, both in his first term and now in his second, becomes much more clear.
In Trumpian fashion, his opening gambit was money. “We intend to buy Greenland from Denmark.”
Predictably, this was met with universal European outrage, in part because the Europeans are always on the hunt for something to be enraged at Trump about; and in part because of Trump’s seeming enjoyment of poking the bear. I think he likes it when people are outraged at his plans.
As a response not exactly calculated to calm Denmark and friends, Trump answered their objections by proclaiming his intent to simply take the island by force. Some of the Europeans became highly agitated over this… and others apparently began to wonder if he was serious.
In what I presume were back-channel negotiations, a settlement was reached: If Trump backed off his claim to use force, Denmark would sell portions of the island to the U.S. for strategic military — and perhaps also civilian mining — purposes.
Which strikes this unsophisticated observer as probably exactly what Trump wanted in the first place.
So why go through the kabuki theatre of threats and counter-threats? Probably because this was quicker (and it actually came about quite fast), and probably cheaper than if he had made an above-board offer for a tract of land… and probably because it’s just Trump’s style.
Nothing is ever low-key and normal. In Trump land, It is always “the biggest ever!”, “the most important in world history!”, “nobody else could have done it but me!”
At the end of this day, I suspect the U.S. will end up with strategically valuable real estate on Greenland; Russia and China will be shut out of the island completely; rare earths will flow through U.S. developers to domestic American industry; the Inuits will probably receive some U.S. dollar compensation; and U.S. defenses will guard both North Americans and unappreciative Europeans effectively for the long term.
And nobody has to be added to the roles of Social Security.
It’s a little early yet, but I’d call it a potential win.
Number 2. Breitbart. Kangaroos attack cyclists during road race in Australia.
Halfway through the final stage of the 110-mile international cycling event called the Tour Down Under, a pair of marsupials took umbrage at the invasion of their habitat by two-wheeled humans.
Video shows a kangaroo charging across a paved highway and taking down the race leader, leaving him to recover from road rash and a bent bicycle while other contestants rush past him.
Moments later a second boomer (if I have my Aussie slang correct) bounced right into a tight pack of riders, taking others down.
Interestingly, the voice-over narrator took it in stride. “Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s one of the hazards of racing in Australia… with some of the wildlife [we have].”
Being the political junkie I have become, I suspect the roos were protesting Trump’s planned takeover of Greenland.
Number 1. The Sun, US Edition. Skiers and snowboarders mix it up in Alpine snow-rage incident.
With parts of the USA teetering on the edge of civil war, Russia and Ukraine trading drone attacks in the middle of winter, Trump challenging NATO allies over the use of Greenland, Russia and China salivating over the same territory, Taiwan threatened with imminent invasion, England swamped by migrants, Europe mostly having already surrendered to invading hordes of military-age male “asylum seekers”, and many dictators in the western hemisphere alarmed by a muscular resurgence of the Monroe Doctrine, French skiers and snowboarders decided to have a fistfight in the snow.
A skier ran over a snowboarder’s snowboard.
That is one demographic you do NOT want to offend on the slopes, even at a high-brow place like the Val Thorens resort in the French Alps.
We know it’s high-brow, because the video was recorded by a witness with his Ray-Ban web-enabled Meta glasses.
The fight was joined by half a dozen of the snowboarder’s friends attacking the miscreant skier with fists, skis and poles. Eventually, French gendarmes broke up the fracas.
Where is the Minnesota National Guard when you really need them to calm things down? I could use some hot chocolate just thinking about it.
And thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, January 30, 2026. Almost time to do your taxes, and enjoy that huge refund we have all been anticipating since the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill. I can hardly wait.
Have a good weekend!
