Having watched Mark Zuckerberg’s week-long rollout of the new MAGAfied Facebook/Meta, let me put my chips down on none of this aging well for his company. It’s simply too clumsy and over-the-top and it places too many bets on a lame-duck President who will be governing a still sharply divided country. As much as anything else, these moves highlight Meta’s tech and global regulatory vulnerabilities — not so much vis a vis the U.S. government or even the European Union as other tech giants. These things take a long time to play out. The U.S. government and the executive branch that Trump will soon control can absolutely do a lot of favors for Zuckerberg and Meta. And Zuckerberg has been pretty transparent about what he hopes those favors are. But overall it just tells a very weak and defensive brand story as you see this playing out over the years to come.

If you delve into Greenland discourse you quickly find all sorts of degenerate weirdness. And let me be crystal clear in the second sentence of this post that by “Greenland discourse” I mean more or less nothing about the actual physical place or its people: I mean the imaginings of various North American tech weirdos and Trumpers. I also mean very little about the generally silly conversation about whether the United States will annex Greenland. I stand by everything I wrote about that yesterday. But whenever you discuss Donald Trump’s Greenland jones, or, more specifically, whenever you dismiss it, you’ll hear from a lot of people about the various Silicon Valley fantasies about Greenland and why this is really what Trump’s talking about. I don’t think those are really what Trump’s yakking is about at all. But they’re at least part of the milieu Trump’s now part of. So it’s in the mix, adjacent, part of the idea world that gets these guys excited. Or, stated differently, what gets Trump’s new money men ginned up and thus keeps him talking.

For this little adventure we can start with this TechCrunch article entitled: ‘I went to Greenland to try to buy it’: Meet the founder who wants to recreate Mars on Earth. You have to go deep into the tech weirdo rabbit hole to make sense of recreating Mars on Earth (it has to do with Elon Musk, basically). Because Mars is actually a super-frigid, waterless barren wasteland. I’m into space travel as much as the next guy. But you wouldn’t want to live there or recreate it anywhere. You also shouldn’t try to buy Greenland. But that’s another story.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Trump’s attempts to evade the final dregs of legal accountability, congressional Republican dysfunction and the legacy of Jimmy Carter.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.