☕️ ABOUT FACE ☙ Monday, January 19, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

WEF rebooted for business, NYT melts down; Trump storms Davos; EU trade-war fantasies over Greenland evaporate; NATO blinks; major oil found in Texas; major study links covid policies to drug deaths.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s going to be a BIG week. Your roundup today includes: WEF reconstituted for business instead of progressive playtime, and the New York Times can’t stand it; Trump heads to Davos in force; three big liberal calamities over the end of WEF as the Times knew it; EU collapses like Biden tripping over a sandbag as short-lived fantasies of trade war over Greenland melt away; NATO sends a miniature brigade to defend Greenland then quickly changes it mind once Trump teases tariffs; historic oil discovery in spent fields in Texas; reminders of the Carter gas lines; and more covid expert incompetence revealed as study finds a perfect match between stimulus payments and opioid deaths.

🌍 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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And just like that, the Great Bogeyman, the World Economic Forum, was castrated. The founder, leather-vest wearing German Klaus Schwab —a sinister takeoff on bumbling Sergeant Schulz from 1960’s classic Hogan’s Heroes— has been stuffed into the archives. No more, “you will own nothing! And be happy!” No more, “zey will eat ze bugs!” It’s all over; the fat German has sung. President Trump has occupied the WEF, whose globalist-loving élites today kick off what would usually be a dreadful week of career prostitution (both literal and figurative). A doleful New York Times ran the story with the tragic headline, “As Davos Convenes, Deference to Trump Has Replaced Everything.”

TAW! Today, President Trump will arrive at the “world trade conference” in icy Davos, Switzerland. He is slated to deliver his keynote as the guest of honor on Wednesday— coincidentally the day after the anniversary of his inauguration. The New York Times could barely conceal its dismay and disgust. Trump’s attendance is a catastrophe of epic proportions.

“Why is Trump going to Davos?” asked Mark Blyth, a far-left political economist at Brown University. He then answered his own question: “Trump’s punching them in the head and telling them who’s in charge.” The result? “This is the death of Davos,” Mark dolefully mused.

Sad! They miss Klaus. Without its bloated kingpin of technocratic control, everything is different, worse, and definitely not exciting for progressives at the Times, who have suddenly discovered everything that normal people have been complaining about for years. All it took was for Trump to arrive in force, and the Times can see the WEF for what it really is.

“People with the greatest stake in the status quo — billionaire executives who run the largest banks and technology companies,” the Times sneered sarcastically, “are cast as change agents, uniting with world leaders to pursue the ‘betterment of humanity.’”

That’s actually a pretty neat way of putting it. “Faced with the reality that the world is increasingly run by people who oppose its customary objectives,” the article explained, “the forum appears to have reduced itself to its central purpose: a business meeting.” Egads! Not business at a business forum!

The Times, years too late, has finally awakened to all the bitter WEF irony: “Corporate executives arrive by private jet to express alarm over climate change,” it began, warming to its theme. “Years ago, Davos featured a simulation of the refugee experience,” it smirked, “then attendees continued on to cocktail parties underwritten by consulting firms, grazing on caviar-topped canapés while keeping an eye out for celebrities.”

Years ago. In other words, Davos’s élite hypocrisy has been on grotesque display for years, but the Times is just now getting around to smugly mentioning it, instead of swooning over the forum’s collective brainpower. For some reason.

The Times’ newfound disgust over classic WEF hypocrisy was impossible to miss.

🔥 The overlong article, perhaps better described as a screed or jeremiad, rambled its way to three core complaints, all having arisen since Trump took office. “Much change has transpired in the year since the last Davos,” the article noted, mournfully. Here is the thrust:

1. Progressive darling and mandate king Klaus Schwab is gone, Cuomo-ed, the latest victim of liberal values. “His departure,” the article complained, hinting darkly at dirty work at the crossroads, “was hastened by scandals over how he oversaw the organization; he was accused of mismanaging funds and mistreating female employees.” The irony was lost on the Times.

2. The next problem was, climate change and its woke relatives are off Davos’s hoers d’ouvres menu. “In contrast with previous years,” the article moaned, “there was no mention of climate change or the need for an energy transition.” Not just the green scam. “Buzzwords that once got a strenuous workout — fair taxation, anti-corruption, sustainability, and social justice — were largely absent from the forum’s official pronouncements,” the reporter wrote, gnashing his teeth.

3. This year, the swanky conference is instead mostly focused on President Trump’s priorities. “This time,” the article complained, “any pretense that the values of Davos and Mr. Trump’s worldview are in opposition has been carefully erased.” Instead, “artificial intelligence and crypto have been elevated as the central areas of concern.”

If I wore a hazmat suit while doing it, I could write an encyclopedia about all of this faux hysteria. But I will just make three big points. First, the World Economic Forum as we know it is finished. The élites remain, with their habitual frittering of their collective taxpayers’ money on junkets to luxurious Alpine locations, but the pretense of far-left lunacy has been stripped down to the studs.

Second, more of the Trump Plan has been revealed. Trump clearly realized that, to the big corporations and their sycophantic politicians, the green energy scam was just another line of business. It was an incredibly counter-productive line of business, but it had the advantage of being paid for by governments, who might be slow payers, but are reliable and never haggle over price.

Say what you like about crypto, energy exploration, and artificial intelligence, but President Trump has found for these high-flyers something more productive to do. Building solar panels and windmills is lucrative, but it is a potlach —a ritualistic immolation of capital— benefiting nobody except the businesses that followed the progressive political winds.

Trump realized that you couldn’t just snatch the green energy “industry” away without replacing it with something even better, not without crashing whole economies that had clustered, parasite-like, around a fake green ‘industry’ created by globalist governments instead of markets.

But now, President Trump has refocused them on building AI data centers, along with the infrastructure and energy needed to operate them. Trump has replaced the gold rush of subsidized green energy with a similarly lucrative but much more productive private market (even allowing for the risks created by disruptive technology). The AI gold rush still offers lucrative government contracts— but also sky-high private opportunities as well.

Third, and finally, is the bitter end of what Davos represented to progressives. Until now, the WEF was the Alpine pinnacle of progressive power. As I’m sure you recall, the World Economic Forum was busily educating an entire generation of “WEF Young Global Leaders,” an élite brigade of attractive, polished candidates trained to occupy and subvert governments and big corporations all around the globe.

In a 2017 discussion at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a sinister Klaus Schwab menacingly boasted, “What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate ze global cabinets of countries with our World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders.” Too bad he was also penetrating so many secretaries. But I digress. In the same clip, Schwab doubled down: “Yesterday I was at a reception for Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau, and I know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.”

Sorry, Canada.

So anyway, when the Times watches the WEF’s power draining away into “just a business meeting,” it probably feels like an alligator watching the tourist it had earmarked for itself climb out of the water and up onto the dock. Without the WEF coordinating all these young élites onto the same page of dystopian, technocratic music— who will advance progressive boomers’ agenda?

But the worst threat is that Trump could get behind the controls. Which explains why the Times —whose headline screamed “Deference to Trump Has Replaced Everything”— has suddenly discovered anti-WEF-ism. If Davos isn’t useful to progressives, it must be destroyed as a capitalistic excess. Which is actually fine with me. Tear it down! (I sympathize with all the escorts who’ll forgo their top earning season, but I hope they’ll find more productive employment elsewhere.)

TAW at the WEF! We await Trump’s Wednesday speech with great interest.

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Over the weekend, Trump unleashed more globalist fury in Europe by threatening to impose escalating tariffs on Denmark and seven obstreperous EU countries unless they make a reasonable deal on Greenland. As is their recent custom, representatives of the 27 EU members convened on Sunday for another “emergency summit” to discuss launching a trade war against the US to stop Trump. It fizzled like a wet Roman candle. They chickened out. The Times reported, “European Union Officials Lean Toward Negotiating, Not Retaliating, Over Trump Tariff Threat.”

To be fair, the muscular approach never had a chance of getting off the EU’s flabby ground. I’m not talking about the EU leaders being dainty, conflict-avoiding snakes in the grass, which they undoubtedly are. Rather, I refer to hardened realities. Europe has sent all its military equipment to Ukraine, and now must buy any new weapons from the US, a poor setup for opposing America. The continent’s economy lies in shambles. It’s fair to say the European Union is largely broke.

Perhaps most poignantly, Trump’s new tariffs cleverly targeted only eight EU countries— leaving 19 voting members who’d probably prefer to stay out of the fight, thank you.

🔥 So it was unsurprising that Sunday’s emergency summit produced only one consensus. “Officials would rather negotiate than retaliate,” a depressed Times reported. Lamely, the article, grasping for some sort of hope that someone somewhere will stand up to Trump, added, “officials are still entertaining the possibility of allowing a list of retaliatory tariffs.”

Of course they would say that. They can’t take the possibility of a trade war off the table, or else what do they have to negotiate with? They know full well a trade war with Trump is impossible, but they can’t admit it, or where are they?

President Trump has put a clock on them. Absent a Greenland deal, additional tariffs switch on in ten days, on February 1st. Then, if there’s still no deal by June, more tariffs pile on. I doubt the EU will let the February 1st tariffs hit. Having already watched this movie last year, when the EU threatened a trade war the first tariff time around, you can mark me down for predicting a deal happening within the next two weeks, or at least enough movement toward a deal that Trump will push their deadline a little.

Yesterday, post-summit, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on NBC’s Meet the Depressed. In his calm, intellectual way, with a mild smile, Bessent reassured NBC’s anchors that European leaders would —sooner or later— understand that American control of the island is “best for Greenland, best for Europe, and best for the United States.” Win-win-win! He added confidently, “The European leaders will come around.”

🔥 The media treats Trump’s idea of buying Greenland as some sort of drug-induced brainstorm. But it’s not new. In fact, Trump is the fourth president to try to buy the Arctic island. The first was Democrat Andrew Johnson (1865–1869), fresh off his successful purchase of Alaska from the Russians for two cents an acre. Johnson promptly sent Secretary of State William H. Seward —who’d brokered the Alaska deal— to Denmark, to try to buy Greenland. But the sale fell through.

Back then, critics curled their collective lips and contemptuously called Alaska, “Seward’s Folly.” What do we need all that useless ice for? History.com:

Next up was William Howard Taft (R, 1909–1913). In 1910, Taft’s administration proposed a complicated land-exchange deal that would have transferred Greenland to the U.S. in exchange for concessions in other territories. But again, the deal went phut.

In 1946, after World War II and amid emerging Cold War tensions, Democrat President Harry S. Truman tried again, formally offering Denmark $100 million in gold (worth about $14 billion today) for Greenland, citing its military importance, but Denmark rejected the offer.

President Trump first mentioned buying Greenland during Trump 1.0, so it’s not even a new idea for him. But don’t rely on the Nation’s “paper of record” to remind you about any of this bipartisan Greenland history. Haha, that would be informative. And, well, you know: Orange man bad!

We shall see.

🔥 In related news, which happened so quickly that there was hardly time to report on it before all the air went out, seven EU countries briefly sent a handful of troops to defend Greenland. It sounds like the setup to a joke. France sent 15 soldiers, Germany flew in 13, Sweden (3), Norway (2), Finland (2), the Netherlands (1), and the Empire of Great Britain, which sent a single British soldier. But yesterday —one day after Trump announced his new escalatory tariffs on those seven countries— Bloomberg reported, “German Soldiers Leave Greenland After 44-Hour Stay, Bild Reports.”

“Fifteen Frenchmen, thirteen Germans, three Swedes, and a Brit go into a bar in Nuuk,” the setup goes. But before anybody could come up with a decent punchline, it was all off.

And it was shambolic, featuring optics approaching Biden levels of military incompetence. On Sunday, the German newspaper of record, Bild, ran the skeptical story. “Yesterday, it was said that the soldiers would be staying longer than planned,” Bild reported. “Now the Bundeswehr has departed quickly – without any announcement, notification, or anything else.”

The scalded German government didn’t bother explaining its careful military reasoning. “The order to leave was only received from Berlin very early this morning,” Bild said. “No explanation was given to the troops on the ground – nothing. Just: Return! All scheduled appointments had to be urgently canceled.”

But Bild explained it— by posing it as a question. “It remains unclear,” Bild mused, “whether Germany is withdrawing its soldiers under the threat of punitive tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump against the opponents of his aggressive Greenland policy.” I wonder. Also Bild, yesterday:

German economic expert Professor Gerrit Heinemann told Bild, “Given the bleak growth prospects, the new tariff threats come at an inopportune time.” Bleak and inopportune is one way of putting it.

In the annals of military history, 2026’s heroic Defense of Greenland will go down as one of the shortest-lived and least well-staffed military campaigns of all time. But, if Germany’s immediate about-face when threatened by a tiny little tariff is any sign, not to mention its inability to quickly deploy any more than thirteen troops, this thing should be all over soon.

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I well remember that halcyon period in my childhood when government experts delivered the awful news that we were running out of oil. They said we might have a handful of remaining good years, and so the nation was forced by President Jimmy “the Nut” Carter to go onto gas rationing. This resulted in massive gas lines for consumers, and President Carter soon entering a new line of work. Yesterday, Fox-7 Austin reported, “Geological survey in Texas uncovers 1.6 billion barrels of oil.”

CLIP: NewsWest-9 reports on fresh oil discoveries in Texas (2:08).

The ghastly gas lines of the 1970s were perhaps my first awakening to the deadly perils of experts.

In grade school, teachers taught gullible children the “fact” that oil was a “fossil fuel” that greedy dinosaurs made before they went extinct from climate change. Pretty soon, Ms. Skinner (grade 3) soberly instructed us that all the dinosaur oil was a “non-renewable resource” that would soon, any minute now, be completely drained— after which civilization would collapse (if, that is, the Soviets didn’t nuke us first).

So, Ms. Skinner explained, Democrat gas rationing just made sense. Plus overpopulation!

Now, 40 years on, there’s more oil than ever, and drillers are finding it far deeper than the deepest parts of the fossil record. In other words, oil is not brontosauruses that melted into goo. The now-accepted fact is —and I am not making this up— scientists don’t know where oil comes from. They’re baffled! And —I am not making this up, either— it comes back. Texas oilfields that shut down in the 1980s because they ran out of black gold are being reopened now and are flowing like rivers.

Basically, and unsurprisingly, the experts were completely wrong about everything they assured us were facts about oil. Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

That hasn’t stopped loony liberals from beating the “running out of oil” drum like they are in a heavy metal band. For example, consider this tweet from just last year:

But according to the Fox-7 article, a massive, brand-new Permian Basin deposit was just discovered in Texas, containing an estimated 1.6 billion gallons of oil and an even more impressive 28.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. So.

Never forget that time President Obama insisted that it was impossible to drill our way to lower gas prices. No, he said, we need wind, solar, and biofuels, whatever that is (it sounds smelly).

Welp. A blind squirrel can sometimes find a nut. But not Democrats or experts. They just keep fumbling around and never hit on anything useful. They are so consistently wrong that it’s like they aren’t even trying.

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Finally, in the “thanks a lot, experts” file, the Wall Street Journal ran a op-ed this week headlined, “Did Covid Spending Fuel Drug Abuse?” The subheadline offered the answer: “A new study finds a strong correlation between stimulus payments and overdose deaths.” I call this phenomenon Homicidal Empathy.

The study linked drug-overdose deaths with the three rounds of federal Covid stimulus payments in 2020 and 2021. They found overdose deaths spiked after each round of government payments, with a ‘synchronous’ increase across states, meaning that local factors like lockdowns or other mitigations weren’t responsible.

“The correlation was nearly perfect between the amount of stimulus payments distributed in states and overdose deaths,” the Journal said. “A 10% increase in per capita income from stimulus payments was tied to an 11% increase in overdose deaths.”

This human carnage excludes the economic knock-on effects of the stimulus, like massive inflation.

In a sane world, people would go to jail —and some would go before firing squads— for a cock-up of this magnitude. At minimum, we would have a frank, if not brutal, conversation about the ‘experts’ who produced the pandemic response. At minimum, they should be quarantined from the rest of society, for everyone’s collective safety. But collective safety only seems to apply when it is aimed at everyone else.

Don’t worry, though. We shall never forget. We will hound these rascals to their dying days.

🔥 Finally, this week promises to be another banger. President Trump will haul his entire top political and economic team with him to Davos— widely described as the “largest ever U.S. delegation to the World Economic Forum” in history. The delegation includes five Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials— heavweights like Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Special Envoy Howard Lutnick, and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner.

That influential group isn’t there to flirt with the local fauna. Expect fireworks.

Have a marvelous Monday! Tune back in tomorrow morning, for the latest and greatest roundup of essential C&C news and commentary.

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