← The MeidasTouch Podcast
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United States senators from both parties, Republicans and Democrats and independents, sent a delegation of 10 senators to Greenland to Nook, where they wanted to send a powerful message to the people of Greenland and the people of Delaware, Denmark, we have your back. And we, on a bipartisan basis in the United States, do not support Donald Trump's threats against Greenland, against Denmark, against NATO. If he moves on Greenland and NATO, we will make sure that he is impeached, that he is thrown out, that he is convicted, that he is gone. And we will use all of our resources in the United States Senate to, to ensure that there is not an invasion. We will do everything to protect you. I mean, you had Republican senators there like Murkowski and Tillis and others joining with Democrats like Shaheen and, and Coons and others. Let me show you what went down when the United States senators were there in Greenland, in Nuke, standing side by side with Greenlandic and, and Denmark lawmakers. The prime Minister of Denmark, the prime minister or premier of Greenland. First. Here is Murkowski in her speech that she gave. Short clip. Let's play it. And this is from Nuke. Play this clip.
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C
Thank you. Thank you for your continued friendship, your leadership. And to my friend and the leader of our delegation, Senator Coons, thank you for leading such a strong bipartisan and as you point out, bicameral delegation. I think that that's important. I think it's important that it be recognized that when it comes to matters of relationships with our friends, with our allies, as we have here in Denmark, as we have in Greenland, that it is not a subject of Republicans versus Democrats. It is a recognition again of a strong and a continuing relationship over decades. It is one that we need to nurture. As with all relationships, you need to nurture and take care of them. And you need to have constructive dialogue. And as has been noted, there's not only been good dialogue here at the Parliament today, but this morning earlier with the Prime Minister of both Greenland and of Denmark. Just Yesterday in Washington D.C. we had visits with the foreign ministers of both Greenland and Denmark. So constructive, important dialogue that is ongoing now and will move forward. So it is, it's important to be here. I think presence means a lot. And this again, bipartisan delegation to be here with our partners is important. So thank you for the opportunity to share the time and again the fellowship. We appreciate it.
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This is from Senator Coons. Let's play it.
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C
This is a 10 member bipartisan, bicameral dialogue from the United States Senate and.
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The United States House and we are grateful for your hospitality.
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For 225 years of being a good and trusted and ally and partner.
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We had a strong and robust dialogue.
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About how we extend that into the future.
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We expressed our gratitude for the sacrifice of Danes who served and fought and.
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Died alongside Americans when we were attacked 25 years ago.
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We spoke about the value of NATO.
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And the commitment to respecting the core principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and self determination. And we spoke with clarity about the.
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B
Importance that the people of Greenland make their decisions about their future. So it was a constructive and hopeful dialogue and we look forward to continuing.
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A
Next, I'll show you what a Greenlandic lawmaker had to say. Play this clip.
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C
It was really important for us at the Innardsagtut, the Greenlandic government to attend this meeting with the senators and representatives because we have really wanted to have a dialogue with them. And dialogue is first and foremost really important for us. And I hope we can continue and I hope it's the first of many, many more dialogues we can have in the future because we are a member of NATO and we are happy to cooperate through NATO. And I think we have lots and much more to work with each other on in these situations because NATO has been here for many, many years and we hope that it will stay many more years to come. Thank you.
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A
And next we'll show you what Senator Shaheen said and warned Donald Trump about. Here. Play this clip.
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C
An American military takeover of Greenland would threaten NATO as we know it. And even short of that, just the suggestion that the US Would take Greenland by force does real damage not just to the relationship with Greenland, with Denmark, but to America's own national security. It erodes decades of hard won confidence among allies and it weakens the sense of security that comes with it. And that rhetoric plays right into the hands of our greatest adversaries, Russia and China. Vladimir Putin would welcome any move that fractures NATO or diverts attention and resources away from Ukraine. It's a point that your prime minister made again when we met with her this morning, and she's made very eloquently over a period of time. If we're serious about limiting Russia's influence in the Arctic and beyond, the most effective way to do that is by defeating Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. And that's precisely why the current debate over Greenland makes so little sense. As your prime minister and Greenlandic officials have said, if the United States wants to do certain things in Greenland, whether it's build more military bases, develop the critical minerals that are there, all we have to do is partner with you. All that's been made very clear. We've had a standing treaty with Greenland dating back to 1951. And as many of you know, the United states once operated 17 bases in Greenland. As I said, my father was stationed there in World War II. It was the United States that determined that we were going to close those 16 other bases. So whether it's US bases to defend against Arctic threats or critical mineral deals, your leaders here in Denmark and in Greenland have made clear that they want to partner with us. So I think the threats are not only unnecessary, they are counterproductive. They risk undermining not just our relationship with all of you in Denmark, with the people of Greenland, but the broader NATO alliance in the process. I know there are real deep concerns here in Denmark and in Greenland. Yesterday we met with your foreign minister and with the foreign minister of Greenland. They talked in very personal terms about how particularly people in Greenland who are thinking about their foreign minister, talked about children going to bed at night, worried about whether when they got up in the morning, they were going to have been invaded by the United States. I can see why that feels personal to people. I believe saner heads will prevail. I believe that because we have institutions that are acting in the United States on both sides of the aisle in Congress, there is overwhelming support for our relationship for NATO and among the American people. I don't know if you all saw the recent poll that showed that 86% of Americans said they would oppose the use of military force in Greenland.
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A
And while the Trump regime continues its threats to invade Greenland, and as we have various European countries now spent sending special forces to Greenland to protect it from a United States invasion, you also have the Secretary of Defense, who unlawfully refers to himself as the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announce a major deal with Elon Musk to put grok, the AI that Elon Musk has on X to now go through all of the classified systems and all of the systems at the Department of Defense and to basically, you know, run it here. Just, just watch what Hag said.
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So today we're excited to announce the.
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Next frontier AI model company to join.
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Genai Mil, and that is Grok from.
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Xai, which will go live later this month. So I want to thank you, Elon and your incredible, incredible team for leaning forward with us on this as well. Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department. Long overdue.
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A
I want to bring in Congressmember Jake Auchinklaas. I do want to talk about the GROK AI piece of it all. But Congressmember, you're a Marine veteran. You served in Afghanistan. You led a team in Panama. You have a lot of experience on foreign policy. You saw this meeting that transpired or you've heard about it, you've learned about it, even briefed about it where you had the Foreign Minister of Greenland and Denmark show up. Apparently JD Vance and Marco Rubio continued to say, no, we want to conquer you. We're going to conquer you. And then it kind of ended pretty quickly, this meeting. We've been seeing footage this morning of the Greenlandic Minister almost kind of getting very emotional on TV because the people there are traumatized right now within Greenland. They think they're going to be invaded at any moment. What do you make of this all, Ben?
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B
Thanks for having me back on. He should be emotional. He's defending the sovereignty and self determination of his people. Americans certainly get emotional about that when it affects our patriotic allegiance to the United States of America. Let me, before we talk about current events with Greenland, just rewind the clock to 2019. So in 2019, the Danish intelligence services uncovered a Russian false flag operation in which Russia was falsifying documents purporting to show that the United States was trying to seize Greenland from Denmark. And the reason that Russia is its intelligence services was committed to this operation is that they knew that that false flag operation would sow discord amongst NATO and thereby empower the Kremlin as it attacked or prepared to attack NATO's allies on Europe's eastern flank. Well, the Danish intelligence services found out and debunked this false flag operation in 2019. But it turns out that Russia need not have even bothered to use use its intelligence services because the American President is doing exactly what they were trying to do with COVID services six years ago. What this American President is doing is sowing discord in NATO at a time when NATO needs to be strong and unified as it defends its eastern flank. And two, driving Greenland directly into the arms of the Russias, of the Russian and Chinese governments. I served on the Select Committee on China last Congress. To this Congress, I served in energy and commerce, which has jurisdiction over critical minerals. I will tell you what the President is talking about with national security interests by seizing Greenland has zero efficacy. There is nothing he is saying that makes any sense from a national security perspective. We have everything we need when it comes to our military alliance with Denmark, a founding member of NATO.
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A
A lot of, you know, like Trump has been talking about taking over Greenland now for a long period of time. It's does though seem that it accelerated recently about the time where you had the Russian envoys meeting in Miami though, with Witkoff and with Kushner. That was that weekend in Miami. Then there's that announcement like literally the next day that Landry, the governor from Louisiana would be a special envoy and then to Greenland. And then Landry starts talking about, yeah, we want to take it over. That's why I'm becoming an envoy. And you know, I'm not trying to find links where they don't exist. But when you share the story about 2019 of Russia covert operations wanting to sow discord by planting that seed of threats to the sovereignty of Greenland and then to see, you know, these, these top Russian officials show up, meet with out, meet with Kushner and meet with Witkoff, and then all of a sudden a special envoy gets appointed to Greenland and all these talks accelerate. What are we not talking about right now? You and I will talk about it now, but we're talking less about Ukraine and is there going to be a peace deal there? And with all of these conflagrations across the world, Ukraine now is kind of gets pushed to the bottom of the list, which is what Putin wants.
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B
Ben, you're putting your finger on it. So if you think about NATO, right, it's got an eastern flank where it is trying to defend Ukraine's sovereignty from Russian belligerence. And now it has a western flank issue where it's trying to defend Greenland from American belligerence. This plays directly into Putin's hands. And the link I think is twofold. First, that 28 point plan that the President initially proposed for Ukrainian peace, eight of those 28 points were non starters. One of those points was joint Russian United States minerals, mining and oil ventures. Well, where would those joint ventures happen? In Greenland? And that does two things for the Russian government. One is it ties it back in to a lot of Western trade and commercial exchanges that it had been iced out of after its invasion of Ukraine. And the Russian government needs those sources of revenue. And two, to your point, it demoralizes, disorients and distracts NATO from what needs to be its singular focus, which is defending the sovereignty not just of Ukraine, but of all the Baltic states.
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A
Yeah. And when we're that exact conversation, you're having minerals and other resources, oil, Venezuela and you know, having Delsey, who's very close with Putin and Lavrov and Iran and China, the authoritarians still run Venezuela, along with Deodatos Cabello, Maduro's enforcer. Keep the Maduro regime in place, become in Trump's mind an owner. With Russia now becoming more of a renter of, of of the resources there, you know, are, is part of the framework that Rubio set out about spheres of influence and that Russia has all of Europe and Russia and all that area, Xi Jinping China has all of Asia, the U.S. greenland, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, anything in its hemisphere and then to Europe, what you're saying, then they, then they trade the resources. And you know, where something like Iran comes in and is, it gets a little murkier because that's not necessarily in these spheres. So you've got Trump saying to the people of Iran who are protesting, I've got your back. He said it on January 2. If a single protester gets killed, I got you. We're gonna help the protests start to grow. There's anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands. We don't know the number of people who have been slaughtered, but. Right. It could be. We've heard huge number. We've heard all different types of numbers. And now we're getting conflicting reports. I mean, there may be strikes in Iran, but there seems to be now lots of pushback against that from Russia and else. So I don't. These are the kind of conversations that. What are you making of all of that together?
- [17:48]
B
I think in a first order approximation, you are right that the spheres of influence mentality deeply influences MAGA and this administration. They view it as the manifestation of their America first mentality. So the United States is Western hemisphere, as you said. China gets to do Asia Pacific, including Taiwan and potentially Singapore, definitely Hong Kong, all the way through the South China Sea. And their nine dash line projections, if you're The Philippines, a longtime US Ally, watch out under Donald Trump because now you're in the Chinese sphere of influence and that Russia gets to have its kind of traditional Slavic empire. I think that is a first order approximation, but I think you are maybe not discounting, but maybe underrepresenting is how much crony capitalism and just downright corruption can influence that. Like yeah, the first sort of approximation. I think Donald Trump finds that kind of appealing. But hey, you buy some meme coins from the guy and it's all for sale, right? So that is what I think is going to happen with the Venezuelan oil where yeah, that's the, he thinks that's the United States sphere of influence, but he's kind of open to being bought out of that mentality. And what he has refused to do is rule out US Boots on the ground in Venezuela. Now my boots have been on the ground in Latin America and I recently, just this morning, teamed up with James Talarico, who is the state representative from Texas running for United States Senate in Texas as a Democrat. And the two of us provided our perspective on what the president is doing in Venezuela as someone seeking to represent Texans, the oil producing capital of the world and someone who has military experience in this part of the world. And our consensus is that this does not serve the interests of American national security or of the United States energy economy.
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A
And touching on the crony capitalism or just the self dealing part, where is the oil money from Venezuela going to bank accounts in Qatar, we learned is going to be holding a lot of this oil money. And it's like why would it be going to bank accounts in Qatar versus.
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B
Anyway, Ben, how are the Qataris supposed to afford to buy jets for the president if they don't have Venezuelan money? Please. I mean, makes all the sense in the world.
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A
Let's talk about the grok piece of it. But before hitting there, I mean if you look at what's happening now in Minneapolis and St. Paul and the thousands of ice forces in militarized gear who were there marching around and we've been following these protests closely. And by and large the protests are peaceful and overwhelmingly peaceful. And what you would observe with all the people on the ground watching is these agents would roll in, they start pointing their weapons in people's faces and then they start throwing chemical agents at people who are on the sides of the road. They killed a woman, Renee Nicole Goode. They've shot other people. And then provide stories that often don't match. What happens when you learn the next few days of what really happened. And they terrorize these communities. And they're trying to, you know, now they're talking about Insurrection act and all of these things. It's like this was their design to create something that looked like a war zone, that they created the scenery. And what do you make of it? I mean, you've seen the ICE tactics in Massachusetts as well. Not to the extent in Minneapolis, but horrific stuff has happened in Massachusetts we've been following. So what do you make all of it, as someone who's actually served in the military in major operations, led teams to see how ICE is behaving in the United States.
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B
Now, ICE has morphed under this administration from an arm of the law to an instrument of fear. They have used bounties and social media advertising to recruit individuals. They have then given them bare bones, five weeks of training before sending out these individuals with firearms into combustible situations that ICE itself, as you have said, has engineered to be far more dangerous and contentious than would be necessary for civil immigration enforcement. And Minnesota is ground zero for this operation. ICE needs to be reformed, retrained, the masking, the indiscriminate policing tactics need to end because Americans deserve federal, state and local law enforcement that uphold public safety as opposed to instilling fear in our neighborhoods.
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A
Talk about the Grok AI piece. There's a lot of issues there. And I know you've been concerned about how Grok AI has been used and can be used domestically. Now it's also going to be used as a lever of defense and going through classified documents. And that likely will also play into, though, how it could be used against citizens. So talk us through all of that.
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B
Ben, I don't even know where to start on this one. The first is power. Right now, the three most influential gatekeepers of news, information, entertainment in the world are Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and through its ownership of TikTok, the Chinese Communist Party. Those are the big three. That's a problem on its face, that we have allowed billions of people to access information that is filtered through the algorithms controlled by those three actors. Now, you are fusing that control over ideas and narrative. Or with hard instruments of economic and military power vested in Elon Musk. Americans got to see Elon Musk in action over the first six months of this Trump administration. And it was an unmitigated disaster of not just incompetence and cronyism, but also corruption. They went in claiming they were going to save hundreds of billions of dollars. They instead eviscerated critical Services that Americans rely on, like the pharmaceutical testing laboratory in St. Louis that makes sure that your eye drops don't blind you. And they're after costing taxpayers huge sums of money and trying to target Social Security, they ended up sending one package to Congress to cut $9 billion from the federal budget. Those $9 billion were saved by ending PBS and polio vaccines. So that's Elon Musk in action. And now we're trying to give him a fusion of both ideological and state power. Totally unacceptable. I want to dig in though, in particular to what he has unleashed with Grok. Because Grok is probably the worst example of these AI bots generating non consensual deepfake pornography where individuals can upload photographs of victims and then turn that into intimate privacy violations. GROK was the epicenter for that. They got criticized for it. And then you know what they did, Ben? They turned that feature from a free into a premium product so that now the digital harassment of women becomes another way for Elon Musk to make money. The speaker of the House has said he wants to end this. I have bipartisan legislation that would directly stop it. The Deepfake Liability Act. The speaker needs to put it on the House floor next week.
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A
Before we go, anything else that you think is not getting enough attention that you want to raise or address with our audience of nearly 6 million people?
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B
You know the, the health insurance CEOs are coming to Congress in a couple weeks and there's a lot that we can talk about. What I am going to focus on is some in depth terrific reporting that was done by a firm called Hunter Brook where they looked in to how the big three health insurance corporations, Cigna, CVS, Caremark and UnitedHealth Group are using overseas drug pricing middlemen known as group purchasing organizations to evade taxes, to engage in collusive behavior and to price gouge prescription drugs. This is a story that I think is under told when we talk about the US healthcare system because it's big dollars, it's direct impact to patients who need access to these prescription drugs. And it's also a summation of so much of what frustrates Americans about this economy, which is a small group of monopolies abusing their market power to take advantage of people when they are at their most vulnerable.
- [27:06]
A
Always great to have you on, Congressman. Let's have you back on soon. Let's chat more. Appreciate your perspective on Greenland, especially given your service and as you've said, actually having boots on the ground versus you know, it seems sometimes that this regime talks about things like a game of war versus what what that really means when talking about putting service members lives somewhere. So thank you.
- [27:32]
B
My pleasure. And I'll keep an eye out for Pablo too.
- [27:34]
A
Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. He's talking about Pablo Manriquez, the new Washington D.C. bureau, the Midas Touch Network. Thanks everybody. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our substack@midasplus.com you'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad.
- [27:51]
B
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