☕️ WORLD RUNNERS ☙ Saturday, January 24, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Judges bail church invaders; heat on Lemon; NYT admits NATO’s end; Pentagon’s new strategy ignored; NATO fades as Monroe Doctrine rises; Trump 2.0 concessions; Alberta; Scott Jennings; Ukraine; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Which means it is time for the Weekend Edition roundup: Minnesota judges release church invaders without bond, of course, and DOJ vows to keep squeezing the Lemon; Times essayist agrees the WEF signaled the end of NATO, but it’s okay, everything is fine; NATO rudderless with no modern mission; Pentagon releases its own National Defense Strategy document, and media completely misses the point; NATO sinks right off the priority list, but at least it gets a Green Sweatshirt; Dept. of War demands all Western Hemisphere countries convene for military summit, presumably to discuss the new strategy; NATO replacement hinted; European theatre sinks, Donroe Doctrine rises; Trump predicts running the world; NPR concedes breathtaking scope of Year One of Trump 2.0; Scott Jennings soars on CNN, bless him; Albertan independence movement blossoms along with apparent US support; and Trump breaks new ground in Ukraine peace talks with first trilateral in-person session.

🌍 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Social media chattered angrily yesterday after judges released the three arrested church invaders. CBS reported, “3 activists arrested in protest at St. Paul church released.” But that was not especially surprising. Personally, I’d prefer they remain locked up, or at least be given large bonds. But speaking as a lawyer, the judges’ decisions weren’t completely unreasonable, given that the accused are non-violent offenders who don’t clearly pose international flight risks. Meanwhile, Assistant Attorney General (and covid superlawyer) Harmeet Dhillon told Megan Kelly yesterday that aspiring podcaster Don Lemon is still in the legal crosshairs.

CLIP: Harmeet— “he is not out of legal jeopardy” (1:20).

“It’s been a little frustrating, since after what the magistrate judge did in refusing to sign off on Lemon, we’ve had to stay silent,” Harmeet said. “But we did our homework. It was clear to me that we have the predicate for FACE Act and conspiracy. Lemon has lawyered up; he has a prominent lawyer.”

Harmeet then added, chillingly, “We are going to pursue this to the ends of the Earth.”

Maybe one day there will be a movie: The Fugitive II: Making Lemonade.

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Yesterday, I told you to get ready, because the institutions we’ve all accepted as the bedrock foundations of the world we’ve been living in are crumbling like stale Circle-K cookies. Yesterday, the New York Times published a “guest essay” by a TDS-afflicted Columbia U. researcher headlined, “The End of NATO Is Coming, and That’s No Disaster.” In other words, we’ve leapt directly to Stage 4: okay, it is happening, but it’s good. Remember, not that long ago, NATO was on the upswing, all smiling and happy, and celebrating two new members joining the trans-Atlantic alliance. NBC, July 2023:

But yesterday, the Times’ guest essayist —agreeing with my analysis— opined that it’s all over but for the fat Swedish lady singing:

The author also implicitly acknowledged that nobody saw this coming due to a failure of imagination. “For European leaders, infantilized by decades of reliance on American protection,” the essayist explained, “a world without NATO is all but unimaginable.”

Even more remarkably, and igniting the article’s comments, he teased a climbdown from the core justification for NATO’s existence: the threat posed by wily Russians. “For all its hybrid high jinks and bluster,” the article opined, “Russia doesn’t pose an unmanageable military threat. Just look at President Vladimir Putin’s shambolic invasion of Ukraine.”

Compare that generous outlook to the “Slava Ukraine!” hysteria of the Biden era. In 2023, the two sentences I quoted above would have gotten the author professionally canceled and permanently banned from campus cocktail parties. Times have indeed changed.

We can acknowledge that NATO, like the United Nations, was formed from good intentions in the stunned aftermath of World War II. We can admit that the alliance served an irreplaceable purpose in containing Soviet expansion and preventing global communism.

After all, as former Soviet spymaster Whittaker Chambers noted in his book Witness, if you’d smeared red paint on every communist country on a classroom globe, by the time Reagan took office three-quarters of the whole world would have been scarlet. Chambers confessed that defecting from the Soviet Union in the late 1940s felt like leaving a World Series team to join up with the Bad News Bears.

History proved that Chambers made the right choice. The reprehensible collectivist ideology —at least, in its sovereign form— burned itself out. (We still battle communism in the territory of the mind, but that’s for a different post.) Kudos to NATO and President Reagan. But as that particularly dangerous period passed, the alliance evolved into a parasitic artifact with a nebulous mission that nobody understands anymore.

How could this entrenched monolith unravel so quickly? Maybe it was only a paper lion for the last 30 years, just waiting for someone to come along with a shredder. But if so, only one man saw the potential.

Just a year ago, NATO appeared ready to cruise along in autopilot, for another 75 years under American steam and treasure. It was still growing! But now we’re suddenly in a whole new, “unimaginable” world, and even hardened neocons are beginning to ease into the fifth stage of grief: acceptance.

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Yesterday, NBC ran a remarkable and underreported story headlined, “Pentagon shifts focus away from China in new defense strategy.” The first sentence summed it up: “The Defense Department said in an influential strategy document published Friday that the U.S. military’s top focus is no longer on China but instead the homeland and Western Hemisphere.” That’s all they could find to criticize.

You would think, given everything happening this month, that the publication of the Pentagon’s comprehensive military strategy would make bigger news. Maybe the media is being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Anyway, here are the Department of War’s new priorities, straight from the public document:

You might think this list of priorities is common sense. But the previous National Defense Strategy (NDS) listed China and Russia as the military’s top priorities, along with climate change, and did not qualify deterrence as “not confrontational.”

NBC’s narrative was that sliding China deterrence down to the second spot, below “defending the U.S. homeland,” was “shifting focus away” from the Asian giant. It’s dumb, but there it is.

But now, climate change is completely gone. The focus is back on America First. Endless wars are in the junk drawer. Nation-building has vanished. Enemies have become potential trading partners. And somewhere, Canada’s prime minister is sobbing softly into his pillow.

This new document should not be confused with the White House’s similarly named National Security Strategy (NSS), released last month to dramatic effect. But, like the NSS, the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy was written for non-technical audiences, and I recommend that you skim it, at least. Even Portland readers. Here’s the link.

Rather than carping about China moving one slot below protecting the homeland, NBC might have more usefully reported about how much NATO was deprioritized. But at least it got a Green Sweatshirt.

The NDS pointed out that, even without the US, NATO still outspends Russia ten-to-one. So, the Pentagon concluded, “Our NATO allies are therefore strongly positioned to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense, with critical but more limited U.S. support.” In particular, it shoved the former comedian off on the Europeans: “This includes taking the lead in supporting Ukraine’s defense— this is Europe’s responsibility first and foremost.”

That was the clearest way to say it yet: Ukraine is a you-problem.

Mark my words: there will come a day when experts openly wonder how Europe sucked us into their unimaginably expensive Proxy War in Ukraine— even though it threatened zero U.S. interests. Never forget that they did it through a massive, covid-level propaganda operation— aimed straight at Democrat empathy. Feelings.

🚀 Remember, this is the year of action. So it was unsurprising that, on the same day the new NDS released, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Joint Chiefs Chairman Issues Rare Invitation to Foreign Military Heads.” Right on the heels of releasing its new National Defense Strategy, the Pentagon also promptly convened an “unprecedented” summit of 34 Western Hemisphere countries, to discuss regional defense issues including border security, drug trafficking, securing local trade routes from the Arctic to South America, and the Panama Canal. The summit is scheduled for about two weeks from now. Short notice.

It was the latest surprise. Which explains why the media isn’t entirely sure how to report the summit. They don’t even seem sure exactly which countries were invited. More tellingly, the big military news platforms (like DefenseOne and Military Times) completely omitted the story, which suggests to me that they are keeping it on the down low, since the story is obviously one of the biggest military moves since the Venezuela operation to snatch President Maduro.

As NBC described, the new defense strategy shifts the Pentagon’s top priority from China to protecting the homeland and controlling “vital regions stretching from the Arctic to South America” — the same geographic space for which Chairman Dan ‘Raising’ Caine is now convening a summit. So we just saw the Pentagon release a brand-new Defense Strategy then —in a historic first— summon all the countries related to the NDS’s top priority of Defending the Homeland.

So, it’s not just words. They are dead serious about it.

Here’s something fun to noodle about. It’s far too early, and there is far too little data to draw conclusions, but this “first ever” conference of Western Hemisphere countries —countries essential to US homeland defense— offers the faintest whisper of a NATO replacement. It’s a similar size; there are 32 NATO members, and Cain just ‘invited’ 34 Western Hemisphere countries. The groups share similar interests—NATO’s are in Europe, and this new ‘Group of 34’ is focused on the Americas. (The “Group of 34” is my name for it; nobody else has labeled them yet.)

Whatever it is, membership might not be completely optional. “We will engage in good faith with our neighbors, from Canada to our partners in Central and South America,” the NDS said, “but we will ensure that they respect and do their part to defend our shared interests. And where they do not, we will stand ready to take focused, decisive action that concretely advances U.S. interests.” It then —cough— mentioned the Maduro operation.

And, LOL, the NDS dumped Canada in with Central and South America, with no special credit for Canada’s NATO ally status, just another local neighbor to be managed, like Costa Rica. The price of not playing nice is starting to catch up with Ottawa. (Long before Trump 2.0, Canada has often been criticized for failing to even meet its 2% NATO obligations.)

In any case, if the new ‘Group of 34’ is meant to become something like NATO, it wouldn’t necessarily be a NATO-clone, with Article 5-like mutual defense agreements and so on. NATO was formed in a different time, facing different threats. So if the “Group of 34” is, in fact, a proto‑alliance, it’s logical that it would be built for a different era’s problems —cartels, migration, external great‑power penetration— rather than copy‑pasting NATO’s Cold War collective‑defense template.

🚀 As NATO sinks, the Donroe Doctrine rises. As the European theatre shrivels, the American theatre expands. I was reminded how, in April of last year, the Atlantic interviewed President Trump about his second term compared to his first. One remarkable quote stands out, especially in hindsight. This Trump comment anchored the article’s headline, but the Atlantic mocked it.

President Trump told The Atlantic’s reporter, “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

He said that in April of last year. The Atlantic responded by snidely observing that “the cracks are beginning to show.” How’re those ‘cracks’ looking now?

Two weeks ago, NPR ran a “Morning Edition” story headlined, “How Trump’s ‘America First’ is upending the world order.” Here is the story’s remarkable first paragraph:

That’s only half right. He is ripping the globalist system apart, limb from limb. But how can you say Trump is rebuilding a 19th-century world? Once again, that’s their failure of imagination. They can’t see more than one square ahead on the board. They’re looking only at 19th-century “Monroe Doctrine” politics. But Trump is also promoting equally ambitious and hard-to-imagine things like space, AI, nuclear energy, and “Project Genesis”— all undoubtedly aimed at a vastly higher-tech future.

🚀 I want to be clear about something: I am not arguing that Trump is making himself into a world emperor or King of the Globe or anything. His term expires in three years, and everything he’s done is legal and constitutional. Instead, I’m saying that he (and his team) worked up an astonishing plan that was so big, so bold, and so audacious that it took our adversaries completely by surprise— and against all odds, that plan is working.

It is “working” in the sense that it is toppling globalism like it was a cheap Saddam Hussein statue. But also much more. Its scope is absolutely incredible, historic, and revolutionary. We can’t see the contours yet, because we are right in amongst it, and our imagination boggles almost as much as our adversaries’ imaginations do. We must get out of the forest before we can see the entire landscape.

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I’ve probably said this before, but CNN’s conservative commentator Scott Jennings is a national treasure. This week, he appeared on a Newsnight panel with Cameron Kasky, 25, a young progressive influencer and Parkland Shooting Survivor. The panel was discussing the Epstein Files story (contempt proceedings against the Clintons), and Kasky dropped a snarky comment about President Trump being “clearly” involved in a network of international sex trafficking.

Scott Jennings@ScottJenningsKY

Someone got the call… I’m not sure if that smug retraction is gonna hold up in court, kid, but you just might find out 🤷‍♂️

10:30 PM · Jan 21, 2026 · 2.6M Views

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4.88K Replies · 16K Reposts · 95.2K Likes

The moderator then shifted to Scott and, changing the subject, queried him about the Greenland crisis. Jennings looked astounded. Pointing toward Kasky, Scott asked, “we just gonna let that sit? Are we here on CNN going to claim that the President is part of a global sex-trafficking ring?” The moderator mumbled something about handling the fact-checking himself, but then, with a pained expression like he’d just realized he’d swallowed something with six legs, turned back to Kasky and asked him to clarify his Trump comment.

Kasky doubled down: “Donald Trump was provably part of it.”

Scott set Kasky up for a defamation lawsuit. I’m guessing that Trump’s lawyers promptly sent him a demand letter, which, under defamation law, must allow the defendant a brief chance to retract the offending comment. One day later:

Kasky hasn’t mentioned Trump on Twitter/X since. TAW.

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Jeffrey Rath, a long-time Albertan-independence activist lawyer in Canada, teased yesterday that his group will meet with US Treasury officials next month to discuss a “500 billion line of credit to support the transition to a free and independent Alberta:”

I couldn’t confirm the meeting. If it is scheduled, Rath should have probably kept it under wraps. But either way— is the 51st state plan quietly in motion? There has been a lot of chatter about Albertans organizing a petition drive for an independence referendum. The Albertan government quickly changed a law in December that might have blocked the referendum effort, so commenters feel the provincial government supports the move.

Alberta holds some of the world’s largest proven oil reserves (primarily in its oil sands), estimated at around 167 billion barrels— nearly four times the U.S. total. That makes it a massive source of conventional and unconventional oil. Alberta is also the most conservative province in Canada, and most aligned with Trump policies. It’s questionable whether the rest of Canada could long survive without the province.

I can’t tell how serious the Albertan separatist movement is. Polls are unreliable, of course, and most serious commentators treat the movement as a strange outlier, like the movement for Texan independence. But these days, you never know.

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Yesterday, the BBC ran a story headlined, “Russia, Ukraine and US hold trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi.” Since just after the beginning of the war, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have refused to be in the same room together. But it happened last night in Abu Dhabi, for the first joint session since the initial talks collapsed in 2022. Yesterday’s meeting included representatives from Russia, Ukraine, and the US.

As usual, all that was publicly released was that the talks were “productive,” a diplomatic bromide that only means there wasn’t a fistfight. If the discussion gets really rough, they might go so far as to report a “frank and transparent conversation.”

But we can observe some clues in how carefully they arranged the seating. You’d be amazed how much thought goes into something like that.

For one thing, there was no conference table— nothing between the parties. Second, they weren’t sitting directly opposite each other— so none of the men had to hold or avoid eye contact. Finally, Jared Kushner sat amidst the Muscovites, and Steve Witkoff sat among the team from Kiev—suggesting, through the seating chart, that the US is simultaneously ‘neutral’ while also ‘supporting’ both sides. Kushner and Witkoff also divided the adversarial parties’ blocs, lending a ‘conversational’ rather than ‘oppositional’ tone.

Amusingly, Europe —which, for the last year, loudly demanded a seat at the table in any talks— is finally completely out of the way, extracted from the discussion like a diseased tooth. “Europe remains largely frozen out of U.S.-Russia-Ukraine discussions to end the conflict,” a CNBC story reported, “despite attempts to advocate for Kyiv in order to prevent unfavorable peace terms being foisted on its neighbor.” It’s none of their business.

The big issues are boiling down to the painful problem of just how much of Ukraine’s real estate Russia gets to keep, which, as you can imagine, annoys everyone more than a sore pimple on the end of your tongue. (And for goodness’ sake, let’s not ask Denmark about conceding territory.) BBC, two days ago, in advance of the meeting:

Kiev’s negotiating team — which did not include the Green Sweatshirt (size: XS) — is nearly completely reconstituted, after most of the old one vanished in a sudden cloud of corruption scandals. Whether the switcheroo will produce any better results remains to be seen. But the fact that they are physically moving closer together —finally in the same room together— is a metaphor that the two sides are moving closer together in the negotiation as well.

Once Ukraine settles, all the major global conflicts will be resolved. The new Board of Peace’s focus can shift to smaller regional problems, like Somalia, Haiti, and the Republic of Minnesota.

Have a wonderful weekend! Then meet us back here on Monday morning, as we soar into January’s final week, with an all-new roundup of essential news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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