As I’m sure you are aware, the Venezuelan opposition leader presented the American president with Nobel Peace Prize medal during their White House meeting this past week, and according to multiple accounts, Trump kept it.
But of course he did.
“María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done,” he boasted on his social media platform. “Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!”.
Let’s be wholly clear here, he did not get the actual prize. Like much of what he does it is all just theatre. That reality has been made very clear by the Nobel Peace Center. They issued a statement: “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot.”.
Canada has a new Military Partner – China
Trump’s arrogant and insulting abuse of Canada is something Canadians felt on a visceral level. The sense of betrayal is off the charts. On a more practical level, Canada needs a large trading partner that is stable and mostly predictable. China was the obvious choice …
Carney is currently in Beijing describing a “new era of relations between Canada and China” and explicitly talking about both countries becoming “strategic partners” on a comprehensive range of issues, including “issues on security.”
There is no overstating how extraordinary this is to anyone who’s followed Canada-China relations in the past few years. Canada was probably THE country globally most aligned with the U.S. when it comes to China.
As a reminder they literally abducted the daughter of Huawei’s founder on the U.S.’s behalf and held her hostage for years despite severe Chinese retaliation – all in service of Washington’s containment strategy.
So for all intents and purposes Canada used to actually embody the Monroe Doctrine in practice: they were all-in on the US! And now Trump has achieved the extraordinary feat of changing that calculus, impressing upon Canada that HE was the threat and that they needed to hedge their US exposure.
I mean, imagine telling anyone during the Meng Wanzhou episode that 4 years later Canada would be in Beijing, asking them for a strategic partnership on security matters while America threatens to annex it
Primary Military Threat to the EU – The US
Europe is now performing military exercises against their primary threat, the United States.
Iran
For context, at 34 And Park in Minneapolis, a woman tried to drive down the street where a protest had broken out in front of a home ICE was raiding, saying she had a doctor apt to get to. ICE agents busted out her windows, cut off her seatbelt, and pulled her out before arresting her.
- She was a split second away from being shot in the face, either for doing one of the things they were telling her to do, or for not doing any one of them, and there was no way for her to have avoided it by knowing which. Sheer luck she’s not dead.
Clay Jones – Donald Trump cares more about protesters in Iran than he cares about protesters in America. #Trump #Iran #IranianRevolution2026
Nick Anderson – Supreme Leaders
Rob Rogers – Trump is ready to punish the Iranian regime for violently cracking down on the Iranian people. Meanwhile, Trump is violently cracking down on American cities. #Iran #IranianRevolution2026 #Trump #ICE #crackdown #Protest #immigration #Minneapolis #Minnesota #ReneeNicoleGood
More on Greenland
The following is of course a joke, but hey @Denmark, it is still an interesting idea …
ICE Gestapo
Bovine is a damn liar …
Senate Democrats absolutely have to shut the govt down to stop this ICE insanity in the Twin Cities. This is not sustainable & cannot be normalized. Any Democratic vote to provide money to the thugs who are brutalizing this community is a grave betrayal to the people here. Accountability can’t wait.
Chris Britt – The cover up
Rob Rogers – Well, 250 years was a pretty good run. But now it’s over. Our precious democracy is devolving into a reckless and violent police state where civil rights and the value of human life mean nothing. #ICE #Minneapolis #Minnesota #crackdown #violence #immigration
Antisemitism
It’s worth remembering that the top Trump donor by far—by orders of magnitude—is Elon Musk, an infamously virulent antisemite. Jews voted in staggering numbers against Trump and his former copresident Musk, and it’s reasonable to feel like Trump’s neo-Nazi regime wants vengeance.
How is the Economy Going?
The good news is, that billionaires, inheritors of great wealth, insider traders, and crypto scammers are doing extremely well. As for the rest of us … not so much, but mental health and substance abuse counselors appear to be in high demand.
- A guy who has completely F**ked up every business he has ever touched has somehow managed to … (well yes, you already know the rest).
Corruption on a truly epic scale
f you pay him you can do all the fraud you want www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/u…
Gaza Grifting
$1 BILLION per nation to stay on the Gaza “Peace Board” — with Trump controlling the money. Obscene, indefensible corruption. Monetizing the slaughter. There is no bottom. finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-w…
Multiple layers of Lunacy and utter incompetence
- Either he knows and does not care, or he really does not grasp how truly incompetent he is – neither is good.
$125 million just to change the name …
The pipe bomber is a 2x Trump voter and will argue Trump’s insurrection pardons apply to him also www.fox5dc.com/news/dc-pipe…
The Department of Labor has just posted its second Nazi slogan (in the original, “Germany for Germans”) in the last two days. No one believes this is a coincidence. They are telling America exactly who they are and what they intend.
Rob Rogers – Trump is threatening regime change. No, not in Iran or Cuba. Much closer to home. #FED #JeromePowell #Trump #RegimeChange #Iran #Cuba #Venezuela #economy #inflation #InterestRates #FederalReserve #DOJ
Boat Strike Reveal
HUFF POST: “Key military member called hotline, feared Trump’s boat strikes were illegal… The service members tasked with carrying out these strikes are left in a terrible bind…” www.huffpost.com/entry/milita…
- Hot Tip: It is illegal.
- The Department of War is actually the Department of Piracy … or to put that another way, they are the Pirates of the Caribbean.
RFK Jnr Healtcare
So this raw stupidity happened …
Quote (from here) …
If the USDA does somehow interpret the guidelines so that school lunches contain even more meat, “we’re going to see a devastating increase in diet-related chronic diseases for children,” like diabetes and metabolic syndrome, Waterman said. Kennedy has said that fighting childhood obesity is a major component of his Maha initiative. But, Waterman continued: “Promoting full-fat dairy and red meat, as depicted in the food pyramid, is going to have the opposite effect on childhood obesity as Kennedy intends.”
Dr Steven Novella expresses what many who have read the guidelines can clearly see …
the recommendations are a mess. They are not evidence-based, not well-thought out from a public health perspective, and not even internally consistent. They are unlikely to make Americans more healthy, and in fact are likely to do the opposite. Given this is how RFK operates, we should expert more of this.
MAGA Christian Cranks
The nuttier right-wing religious fanatics within the MAGA cult are as always doing their thing, and so below are this week’s samples. What becomes very clear is that these people are basically violent and morally bankrupt Fascists who use religious rhetoric to convince the mob to roll with them. It’s an old trick called the “Divine Right” cloak. Claiming to speak for god means that you are supposedly opposing god when you criticise them. You can of course play the same game; God has decreed that none of them speak for him, that they are all heretics, and that all of them are not going to the good place (my “authority” to claim that is just as valid as their authority is for everything they say).
- Freedom of religion wasn’t an accident or a naïve mistake by the Founders, it was a deliberate safeguard born from centuries of bloodshed in Europe, where state-enforced religion meant persecution, civil war, and tyranny. The First Amendment exists precisely because the Founders understood that when government decides which faiths are acceptable, liberty dies.
- This isn’t a critique of American law; it’s a confession of hostility toward pluralism, constitutional democracy, and the very freedoms that allow pastors like Partridge to speak at all.
Lorenzo Sewlle fumes that Democrats “have raised up these demonic judges” to thwart President Donald Trump’s agenda.
- It’s weird how “demonic judges” enforce the law.
Rick Green declares that David Barton is “the most Christ-like man I’ve ever known.“
- Does Mr Green not appreciate that it is blasphemy to suggest that Christ lied about everything in order to manipulate people and gain funding?
Stephen Wolfe says that “the first law that our country should bring back … is a Sunday blue law and that should be to restrict ordinary commerce so that people will attend church.“
- People don’t experience spiritual renewal when attendance is coerced, they experience resentment. History is clear on this: forced piety produces hypocrisy, not devotion. If Christianity needs the police power of the state to fill pews, that’s not a sign of cultural strength. It’s an admission that persuasion has failed and compulsion is all that’s left.
As is inevitable, Renee Good also attracts a bit of “fan mail” from this group of nuts.
John Doyle claims that Renee Good “dedicated her life to rebelling against God and it got her killed.“
- As usual these liars just make it all up. There is no evidence in reporting that Good was motivated by any particular religious or anti-religious ideology, or that her personal faith (and she did have one because she was religious) was a factor in the shooting.
Edward Szall proclaims that Good was “demonically-possessed reprobate moron.“
- Calling a real person who was killed a “demonically-possessed reprobate moron” isn’t theology, moral clarity, or courage, it’s dehumanization. Historically, language like this is how extremists justify cruelty. Once someone is labeled demonic, stupid, or irredeemable, empathy is treated as a flaw and violence becomes easier to excuse.
- Christianity, at its core, teaches humility, restraint of the tongue, and compassion for the dead and their families. Publicly spewing contempt for a woman who cannot defend herself is not prophetic witness, it’s performative cruelty masquerading as righteousness.
Gene Bailey has a question regarding Rep. Ilhan Omar: “Why is she still in the country? She should be deported.“
- It’s right-wing to: 1) disagree with her views, 2) Criticize her voting record or statements, 3) Argue she should lose re-election. What Bailey said is not that, it is something completely different. It is raw unadulterated Fascism to suggest that a US citizen and elected member of Congress should be removed from the country.
William Wolfe can’t understand why anyone would oppose Christian nationalism: “We are going to order ourselves as this people, as this nation with Christianity as a very important, if not the most important, identity marker for us in how we do our laws, our civil customs, our civil religion, the life that we expect to share together and what we call people to aspire to. Why would you not want that?”
- What he says lays out Christian nationalism in unusually explicit terms, which is precisely why many people do oppose it.
- People oppose the vision Wolfe describes because it replaces shared civic equality with religious identity as a governing criterion. You don’t have to be anti-Christian to reject that—you only have to believe that faith should be chosen, not imposed, and that citizenship should not depend on creed.
Christian nationalist pastor Jack Hibbs declares that he doesn’t want to be around anyone who votes for Democrats: “I don’t want to be anywhere near you because that kind of conduct is dangerous.“
- Disagreement is normal in a democracy; declaring millions of people unsafe to be around is not. But hey, look on the bright side here, we finally have an effective Hibbs repellant.
Lance Wallnau finds a biblical justification for Trump administration’s threat to take Greenland by force.
- Finding a “biblical justification” for a modern state threatening to seize territory by force is a classic example of religion being conscripted to sanctify raw power. It takes ancient religious texts—written for specific historical and moral contexts—and repurposes them to legitimize contemporary geopolitical aggression. That move says far more about the speaker’s politics than about the Bible.
- What’s wrong here … well OK, let’s pull it apart. When religious leaders speak this way, the danger isn’t abstract or metaphorical; it’s real, immediate, and deeply corrosive to democratic life.
- Praising authoritarianism as “a gift from God” is a well-worn move in extremist politics. It reframes the concentration of power, erosion of norms, and abuse of state authority not as choices open to criticism, but as sacred and unquestionable. Once power is declared divinely sanctioned, dissent is no longer disagreement—it becomes rebellion against God.
- Praising ICE in this context isn’t a neutral endorsement of law enforcement; it’s part of a broader pattern of celebrating coercive power while stripping it of accountability. When religious figures bless state force unconditionally, they shift the moral calculus from justice and restraint to obedience and punishment.
- Civil wars are not abstract resets; they are defined by mass death, social collapse, and long-lasting trauma. To speak of one optimistically is to normalize political violence and prepare followers psychologically for it.
The wider community of believers should view rhetoric such as the above as a corruption of faith, not an expression of it. Turning God into a patron of authoritarian rule and civil conflict empties religious language of moral content and replaces it with tribal loyalty and domination.
Weirdest of the Weird
Some continue to strive to be as obnoxious as possible. The reason is basically greed. They say what they say to gain clicks and $$$.
- His claim isn’t just offensive, it’s historically bankrupt and morally indefensible … but hey, this is Joel, so this is not a shocker.
- Holocaust denial or minimization is a classic extremist move, not a good-faith historical argument. The scale of the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented events in human history: millions of primary documents, survivor testimony, perpetrator confessions, physical sites, and even Nazi records themselves. Saying it was “probably not as bad as we’ve been told” isn’t skepticism — it’s ideological laundering of genocide.
- The idea that Hitler “didn’t know” is equally absurd. The Holocaust was not a rogue side project; it was state policy, discussed in meetings, implemented by the SS under Hitler’s authority, and repeatedly referenced in his speeches and writings. Even conservative historians who once debated the mechanics of decision-making abandoned the “Hitler didn’t know” line decades ago.
- Joel and others like him take this stance because Fascism requires the rehabilitation of past fascists.
FYI, to give you an idea of the type of guy he is, this past week he was also saying that wives must submit to their husbands with “a sense of fear, and trembling, and awe … not only in things she agrees with, but in everything“: “She belongs to him. He owns her.“
- Either his wife urgently needs a divorce lawyer or she has a bondage fetish.
Education
Bloomberg clearly doesn’t understand how higher ed works. These days schools make much of their tuition revenue off foreign students paying full freight, so when a school is under economic stress the first thing it does is radically increase its foreign student population—even against visa headwinds.
Even More Political Cartoons from the past week
As always, there are many excellent cartoons.
Media Madness
Alternate headline: “Is @joerogan really going to pretend he wasn’t warned repeatedly about his support for this guy?”
- Reality Check: Rogan will never admit he fucked up until the fire he started reaches him personally.
Taking a Stand
Should be pretty open and shut, just like Ford’s imaginary “investigation” (what’s to investigate? what he said was true.)
Trump did hear, and his response was to flip him off, which honestly is his stance towards literally everybody. The following is not AI, it really is him …
Nazis.us
So this happened …
Finally
Kimmy Kimmel
Trump has really kicked 2026 off with a bang, our FIFA Peace Prize-winning President posted this morning about potentially instituting the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, he keeps claiming that the protestors are paid, we are seeing so much unnecessary and disgusting brutality in a lot of cities right now, Trump is floating the idea of skipping the next election, he finally came up with “The Great Healthcare Plan,” today was the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Machado where she gave him her Nobel Peace Prize, Jimmy offers Trump one of his awards in exchange for leaving the people of Minneapolis alone, Trump still wants to take Greenland, and This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.
Stephen Colbert
We’re learning more about what it takes to become an ICE officer, Greenland’s diplomatic delegation needed a smoke break after meeting with Vance and Rubio, and the parties at Mar-a-Lago keep getting weirder.
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart digs into Trump announcing himself as Venezuela’s acting president via Wikipedia, dividing Venezuela amongst cooperating oil companies, making a game-time decision to involve himself in Iran, and setting his sights on conquering Greenland so Russia can’t have it. Plus, Trump’s rules for January 6th rioters don’t square with the MAGA rhetoric around the January 7th ICE killing of Renee Good. #DailyShow #JonStewart #Trump