Donald Trump Jr. paid a visit to Greenland Tuesday, flying to the territory on his father’s private plane, and seemed to give weight to the president-elect’s half-baked plan to acquire it—despite the fact that it is currently an autonomous territory within Denmark.

While the younger Trump didn’t have any plans to meet with political leaders, he brought along pundit Charlie Kirk and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor on a trip he described as tourism.

“We’re really happy to be here. We’re here as tourists to see this incredible place,” Trump Jr. told a local broadcaster. He said he had spoken to his father, “and he says hello to everyone in Greenland.”

Later, Trump Jr. visited a restaurant with his friends and called his father on speakerphone.

“I just want to say that it’s a very special place. It needs security for itself but it also needs security very much for the world, the location, really,” Trump said through his son’s phone. “You see the people and the ships sailing around and they’re not the right ships. They’re not the ships you want to know about. So, we need security and our country needs it and the whole world needs it.”

Filming for @ArtoftheSurge in Greenland.

President Trump just called into a lunch @DonaldJTrumpJr, @charliekirk11 and @SergioGor are having with the local community in Nuuk. pic.twitter.com/T1Hca62GQB

The visit follows a Truth Social post from the president-elect Monday night where he reiterated his plan to annex Greenland and seemed to be under the impression that its people were on board with the idea, despite the fact that Greenland’s own leaders disagree.

“I don’t want to be a pawn in Trump’s hot dreams of expanding his empire to include our country,” Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, said. Last month, Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said that the island is not for sale.

What started as blatant trolling by Trump appears to be being entertained as a serious plan. The president-elect has also discussed annexing Canada, even inviting Canadian businessman and Shark Tank panelist Kevin O’Leary to Mar-a-Lago to discuss the plan. Trump has also floated taking over the Panama Canal zone, which was predictably met with hostility from Panama’s president. Is this what the next four years will look like?

It’s official: Mark Zuckerberg is turning Meta into yet another propaganda machine for Donald Trump and the far right.

In a video statement published Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be enacting a series of policy changes purportedly for the purpose of fostering free speech, but his declaration devolved into an explanation of just how spineless he intends to be in the face of a second Trump administration.

As reasons for allowing more unfettered speech, Zuckerberg declared that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” and that there has been “widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.”

He announced that Meta will end its third-party fact-checking program in favor of community notes. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Zuckberg said.

He also made sure to flag that his decision was a direct response to Trump’s return to the White House. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward prioritizing speech,” he said.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg continued. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

In a statement, Meta referred specifically to Elon Musk’s X, which has essentially become an unusable cesspool of misinformation and hate speech, as an example of the triumph of community notes.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X—where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” the statement said.

Zuckerberg also declared that Meta would “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender, which are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

His specific reference to these two “topics,” which encompass vulnerable communities often targeted by Trump and other conservatives, signals his complete submission to the far right’s mission to steer public discourse straight into hell. As if the repeated references to the dangers of “legacy media” didn’t indicate that strongly enough.

Zuckerberg’s statement also demonstrates a willful ignorance of the way misinformation and hate speech about these issues endanger the lives of people offline for the sake of fostering conversation about whether all people should have the rights and dignities of others. Over the summer, Trump’s racist lies about pet-eating immigrants spread across the internet ecosystem like wildfire, and even though they weren’t based on anything at all, they were treated as if they were as worthy as any actual reporting about immigration. This is the kind of internet Zuckerberg said he hopes to foster.

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions; shut down people with different ideas,” he said in his video message.

Zuckerberg also said he would be changing........

© New Republic