They may be loud, but the actual percentage of Americans who want to force Greenland to become a part of the US is similar to the percentage of Greenlanders who want Greenland to become part of the US.
It's curious to me though, that:
The majority of state governorships,
The majority of state congresses,
The majority of law enforcement,
The majority of military members,
The majority of the US house,
The majority of the US senate,
The majority of the US labor unions,
The majority of the US corporations,
The majority of the US media organizations; both legacy and new,
The majority of the US Supreme Court,
and of course the US Executive branch....
... all belong to the right-wing party we're supposed to believe, according to online rhetoric, is actually only backed by ~30% of Americans. You'd expect a more broad and public resistance if that were true?
Supposedly the centrists and left-wing party members are the silent majority while the right-wing party enacts their agenda with no resistance?
I think the reality is; what we see and hear in the real world is who the US truly is.
I think for law enforcement and corporations, there is more money and power to be found in supporting the right, so it requires strong leadership to try to do what is best for the population instead of themselves. On the corporate side, this isn't helped by the view pushed into the legal system that corporations only social responsibility is to make the most money for their shareholders in the short term.
We seem to have a system of democracy that may be inferior to many other countries and the cracks are showing. On the not so positive other hand, countries that I would have said have a more robust system are also starting to show cracks, and I don't think it is only because of the influence of foreign big money.
Some of these are just wrong - unions generally lean democratic:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/17/key-facts...
I’m also skeptical of the media organization claim.
And it should surprise no one that purely profit driven corporations switch their professed values with different administrations - see the rapid adoption of DEI programs during the Biden administration, then subsequent abandonment in the Trump era.
Some people are Republicans because of their opinions on abortion. Some because of their opinions on immigration or crypto regulation. Or their dislike of covid lockdown policies associated with Democrats. Or their preference for tariffs. And so on.
So if a given voter's most important issue is crypto regulation, even if this voter is pro-choice and supports traditional multi-lateral foreign policy, they very may well support Republican politicians, not because they are against abortion or want to invade Greenland, but because those issues are less important to them than their primary issue of crypto regulation.
Now I'm not saying this exonerates the character of the nation. One could argue that it is immoral for voters to prioritize crypto deregulation over multi-lateral foreign policy.
I'm just saying that it is very plausible that only a small minority of the US population supports an invasion of Greenland and, given the political system, there is nothing particularly mysterious about that fact.
It comes down to power and money. In any capitalist economy with large highly profitable corporate entities, the part(ies) that represent their interests most strongly are simply going to have more leverage and power.
Biden and Harris made the "mistake" of starting to go after Silly Valley for tax evasion and for social/communal issues and so on.
They made the "mistake" of trying to actually advance, modestly, some climate change policy that hurt the oil industry. They made the "mistake" of harming the same global energy industry by heavily sanctioning energy superpower Russia and trying to defeat it in a proxy war.
They made the "mistake" of trying to regulate the cancer that is the cryptocurrency "industry."
And they were completely buried for it. "Allies" in the tech industry just completely abandoned them, and put Vance up as their sock puppet. Musk went scorched earth.
It doesn't matter that centrist opinions might accord with the majority of US society. At least to some degree.
It doesn't match with those who hold real effective power -- monetary, capital power -- need.
Capitalism and democracy only sometimes overlap. They only do so when people keep corporate interests in check through mass action and opposition and unionization and having an active social democratic party, etc. Something the US entirely lacks.
Unfortunately, the political system in the US has been untenable since Citizens United. We only have two viable parties, and both receive their funding from the same sources. I regularly send letters to my Democrat senators and representative, and based on the responses I get back, I can only assume Republicans and Democrat are the same party - they just wear different fashion.
The powers at be are waiting for a Reichstag fire. But, (luckily) Americans are too lazy for that.
At the very least, a general strike. That's absolutely the bare minimum that should be expected of the 94% of US citizens that do not support this regime (as is the claim upthread).
I don’t think the allies made any exemptions for the German that wrote their representatives in the lead-up to and during the second world war. All got stuck with the bill, 6 million got forcibly deported from their homes. There is a thing as collective guilt and responsibility.
Your country is on collision course with mine, threatening invasion. I really don’t think a few letters absolve you.
I might like you as an individual, who knows, but you can’t run from some responsibility for this.
The percentage isn't low, you just aren’t going to find them here. And by here I mean hackernews, or the cities that people who are on hackernews live in. There are basically two Americas and they don’t really mix.
There are also moderates who see both sides as corrupt. I’m one of those, but unlike me some of them were disillusioned enough to vote for trump and didn’t know what they were getting into. If you actually look at those voters, they are really confused by this Greenland nonsense.
It's like commenting that it's weird everyone in any sort of position of power in Russia just happens to be a Putin supporter.
But still, I saw a good clip from Bernie Sanders arguing that when people voted for Trump, they weren't really voting for giant tax breaks for billionaires, or making health care much more expensive, or kicking lots of people off food stamps (though I'd argue they should have realized these things were coming if they had paid attention). What they were voting for was a fundamental shake up of the system, and (for better or worse) Trump was the only one offering fundamental change, vs. the incremental anodyne "can't we all just get along" milquetoast plans from the Democrats (or at least the "elite" Democrats).
Also, for this imperial expansionism issue in particular, I'd argue that this really does feel like a 180 flip flop from Trump after all his "America First" and isolationist rhetoric. For a lot of other issues, for example the immigration crackdown or tariffs, I was truly baffled that some people were surprised how dumb or extreme his policies were, as he basically laid out that this was exactly what he was going to do in the campaign. But putting us in the path of more global conflict and territorial expansionism was actually the exact opposite of what he said he'd do. I'm not that surprised because he's such a transparent malignant narcissist, but again, at least on this issue he flip flopped.
The invasion of Greenland was not a topic of discussion during the election.
(On a side note, I was quite surprised when during Trump’s inaugural speech on Jan 20 2025 he said America will expand its territory. I had no idea he really meant to attack other countries. How little did I know)
It’s not. Maduro’s removal is supported by roughly a third of Americans [1].
It’s vastly more popular than a military engagement over Greenland.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/only-33-americans-app...
If Trump quells all that and his invasion goes ahead, he'll trigger an international crisis too. Does NATO simply implode, or do the EU and other former-NATO countries form an anti-U.S. alliance? What kind of insurgency forms in Greenland? Does what's left of the old world order turn against the U.S. with economic sanctions? Does China take advantage of the moment to finally invade Taiwan? How loudly will Putin be laughing during all this?
We can only hope Trump is merely trying to distract people from the Epstein files with a bluff.
These questions would at most be raised after it already happened, and after watching a few political influencer like Zack who routinely gets 50k+ viewers I suspect your trust in "most Americans know the difference" to be exaggerated, sadly.
This scenario also strongly reminds me of an old fable from the Middle ages, where the king reassures the peasant that the noble will be punished if he kills the peasant... But what meaning does such a punishment have for the peasant who'd be dead?
So yeah, there will be political fallout once Trump's invades it's ally Denmark, at it will invalidate NATO entirely. But does that matter to the annexed people? They'll still have lost their sovereignty to be exploited by American mega corporations.
Venezuela could realistically come out of this with their sovereignty intact and no significant U.S. takeover of their oil industry materializing. If anything, the lesson we should learn here is that Trump is so inept that, should he try to take over Greenland, he may trigger all the negative consequences of doing so without actually accomplishing much of anything. Someone living in Nuuk, far from any American military base, might be forgiven for not noticing when they wake up in an American territory. A couple of leaders might get a promotion and the cheques may start coming from Washington rather than Copenhagen, but the Americans may have no interest in governing Greenlanders and American mining companies may refuse to get bogged down in another one of Trump's swamps.
This is implicit in the reaction of the EU: If the US takes over Greenland, Europe will close down all American bases in Europe.
This is what makes this particular foreign policy so incredibly stupid: The US already gets everything it needs from Denmark/Greenland. The US is considering throwing away European allies to have their flag be bigger on a world map.