Welcome to the Greenland Mineral Extraction Project
My name is Charles, and I'll be your guide, along with special guest Carla Sands
Before we begin our tour of the Greenland Mineral Extraction Project, I would like to introduce you to Carla Sands, Trump’s ambassador to Greenland during Mad Grifter 1.0, who has been an active Trump supporter and campaign contributor since 2016.
Carla has a rich history with Trump, in more ways than one. Like any dedicated cult member, she claimed that her vote didn’t get counted by Pennsylvania during the 2020 election. Her vote was recorded in Cumberland County, but heh, details are for losers.1
Before she married a rich real estate guy, Fred Sands, Carla’s claim to fame was her role in the beloved 1988 film “Deathstalker III and the Warriors from Hell.”
Reviews on IMDB (Internet Movie Database) arrived at similar conclusions as this one:2
Bad acting, bad effects, stupid story. John Allen Nelson (or relson, your choice) loses his English accent within 5 minutes of this movie, and the guy playing Truxardis is wearing the shortest skirt even worn on a man before. from what I understand there are 4 of these films, I think MST should have done all of them, but hey we’ll take this one. Potatoes are what we eat!!
Overall, the 2.8 out of 10 stars seems a little harsh to me. I kind of automatically like anyone who cuts their acting chops on a film distributed by Roger Corman’s B-movie studios, so, of course, I quickly became fascinated by Carla’s career trajectory.
Long story short: The acting career didn’t work out.
So, onward to marrying an old California real estate guy, watching him keel over from a stroke (yikes! that hits home!!!) at the ripe old age of 77, and inheriting his vast wealth of, oh, say, about $150 million.3
Fred got his start selling homes in Brentwood, OJ Simpson’s haunting grounds, established about 65 offices throughout the state, made a mint selling them to Coldwell Banker, then moved on to founding the Vintage Capital Group, which moved on to Carla after Fred ran into Deathstalker IV (based on a true story).
Just before his stroke, Sands was asked about the emergence of Trump 1.0. His response:4
He likes the publicity because that’s how he lives. He’s not really a real estate guy. He licenses his name and surrounds himself with publicity.”
He went on to call Trump a joke, then went off to battle against the real warriors from Hell while Carla made a huge contribution to Trump’s 2016 campaign and donated $100,000 to his inauguration “celebration.” (There’s no indication that she had any involvement in the B horror awfulness, “I Spit on Your Grave.”)
Fast forward to 2017, when Carla was named ambassador to Greenland in the time-honored tradition of rewarding campaign contributors with ambassadorships (all the presidents do it).
What she did to piss off the mad clown enough for him to assign her to Greenland is anybody’s guess. Mine is, based on what we know about the world’s foremost grievance specialist, that her husband called him a joke. Since Fred Sands wasn’t alive, Trump sent Carla to a nation that Alaskans go to when they want to know what it’s like to experience a real Arctic winter.
In 2019, Carla took a tour of a rare-earth mining project in Greenland. Greenland at that time was in the throes of conflict between the 57,000 people who had been living there for a few centuries and the international mining community that wanted to extract all of Greenland’s resources as part of the corporate world’s celebration of terraforming Earth with climate warming carbons.
The government of Greenland finally realized that it needed to protect the nation’s sovereignty and the way of life of its 57,000 residents. So it enacted a law limiting the freestyle mining practices that had quickly enveloped the nation as its ice receded.
But the place is still a magnet for oligarchs.
The Greenland mineral story begins in 1801
In 1801, another actor, Karl Ludwig Giesecke, who was a mineralogist on the side, started collecting a bunch of cool rocks he found on the island. The place was a mineralogist’s dreamscape.
Giesecke collected a huge set of samples while braving the frigid winds off the Greenland coast. He scoured the coastline for several years in his umiaq, an open Inuit skin boat, but eventually his collection was stolen by English warships, who in those days plundered everything, even if they didn’t really know what they were plundering:5
“Hey, that looks cool.”
“Aye, let’s take it!”
And many of the rocks do look cool. Consider allanite, which contains an oligarch’s wet dream full of rare-earth elements, as many as 20 of them in one rock. Isn’t it purty? Take a look:
Of course, back in 1811, when Scottish chemist Thomas Thomson gave the cool, newly discovered mineral its name,6 nobody knew people would be wanting to mine it so that 20-somethings could watch each other dance on a video screen barely bigger than a thumbnail.
From those early days, Greenland developed a geological tradition of mineralogy. The country attracted geologists from all over the world, who studied and recorded what they found over the decades.
All that study and information eventually gave us this:
The child in the Oval Office took one look at this and exclaimed, “Look at all those pretty colors! Can we make this ours?”
And a legend was born.
Carla visits a mining project
As I mentioned before the brief history lesson, Carla visited a large rare-earth discovery in 2019. She took a tour, led by Australian mining firm Energy Transition Minerals, of an area known to mineral extractors as Kvanefjeld. She learned that a Chinese firm, Shenghe Resources Holdings, was one of the Australian firm’s backers, holding, according to most reports I’ve seen, about 11% of the company’s assets.
Let’s be honest here, Chinese companies moving into Greenland is a legit issue. China already controls most of the rare earth mineral wealth in the world. If they shut off access, your phone gets shut off, too, eventually.
But the idea of China in control of Greenland’s mineral wealth is probably only a realistic one if Denmark, Greenland’s colonial master, decides, along with the rest of the world, that the United States is no longer a reliable partner in the future governance of the Arctic.
Oh. Ooops.
There are a jillion ways to combat the issue of China’s control of rare earth metals, including national industrial policy, but the simple-minded troll in the Oval Office has decided America should just “own” Greenland.
And here we are, with NATO building up a military force, “just in case.”
Oligarchs, oligarchs everywhere
Remember the 2024 inauguration and the delirious press reports written by pundits wondering what happened to the tech bros who abandoned the Democratic Party for the lunatic?
Well, for one thing, things have changed since the Clinton years. Despite much well-deserved criticism about the impacts corporations have on the Democratic Party, there’s a significant attempt by many Democrats to cut those chains. It’s no longer cool to be Silicon Valley’s best bud.
But the real sauce is in the next part of our tour of the Greenland Mineral Extraction Project.
This takes us to a newish mining company named KoBold Metals. Kobold uses AI (because of course it does) to identify rare earth mining opportunities in difficult geography like Zambia. And Greenland. It’s apparently pretty good at it.
In early 2024, the company discovered what it described as one of the largest copper deposits of all time in Zambia,7 a landlocked country in Africa teeming with jungle and wildlife. The discovery was large enough, the company said, to produce hundreds of thousands of tons of copper per year.
KoBold specializes in mineral discovery through an AI-driven process, according to the company. According to TechCrunch, the company has 60 other discovery projects around the planet.
And they’re very busy in Greenland.
Just eight months after the company found the Zambian copper deposits, they closed a $500 million round of financing.8
Its investors are a who’s who of oligarchs, tech capital firms, and tech bros:9
Bill Gates
Sam Altman (Open AI CEO)
Jeff Bezos
Michael Bloomberg
Jack Ma
Andreessen Horowitz (a major Substack investor)
BHP (An Australian company)
Bond Capital
Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Founded by Bill Gates as a supposedly “green energy capital investment fund)
Earthshot VC
Equinor
July Fund
Mitsubishi, Standard Investments
StepStone
WCM Investment Management
KoBold, understanding the scope of its copper discovery in Zambia, lured many of those investors by announcing that it would expand the scope of its activities from discovery into resource extraction, a process that, at its Zambian location, would cost more than $2 billion.
It costs a lot to tear up jungles and wreck gorgeous terrain, my friends.
KoBold denied this month (to Forbes Magazine) that it has any interests in Greenland. But this flies in the face of reporting.
Investment firm 80 Mile PLC announced the following in a PR release in May 2025:
80 Mile PLC is pleased to advise that it has agreed to the early reversion of KoBold Metals’ interest in the Disko-Nuussuaq nickel-copper-cobalt project in Greenland.10
In 2024, KoBold invested $11.6 million to drill into the Disko-Nuussuaq area of Greenland, involving about seven different locations.11
There’s stock exchange data, and everything!
The best I can ascertain is this: KoBold is not technically involved in extraction, but will receive royalties as part of its original role as discoverer of the rare earths in Greenland.
So, yes, on the face of it, Trump’s obsession with “annexing” Greenland seems like a bizarre quirk.
Now you know that it’s a bit more than that.
Let the pillaging commence
No matter how we examine the details, no matter how accurate or inaccurate the microdetails are, there’s no doubt that there is a lot of interest in pillaging Greenland.
According to Forbes Magazine, Ronald Lauder was the first person to whisper into the megalomaniac-in-chief’s ear something about annexing Greenland. This happened during Trump’s first term. Lauder was born into the Estée Lauder estate and has apparently decided to use his good fortune by smacking Mother Earth around a bit.
Lauder’s fists were so full of cash he didn’t know what to do with it all, so he made the curious choice of trying to explore Greenlandish political corruption by investing in an unprofitable bottling company there. The bottling company is owned by a Greenland government official and the husband of Vivian Motzfeldt, Greenland’s minister of foreign affairs.12
I’m thinking that investing in an unprofitable bottling company in Greenland isn’t so unprofitable, after all. The world awaits Lauder’s next move, but since we know he gave the mad clown the idea of annexing Greenland, we can expect it to be a massive scheme full of bribes, swindles, and other Trumpiness.
Not to be outdone, Peter Thiel, the purveyor of Paladin, the world’s surveillance company that knows everything about you down to the bowel movement, has joined the Greenland Mineral Extraction Project by (hold on to your hat if you’re wearing one), indicating that he wants to build a “freedom city” for libertarians on the island. Thiel, of course, denies everything.13
It’s possible that he isn’t involved, but enough tech bros have apparently pitched the idea to Trump that it’s now lodged in the festering toxic remains of the grifter’s neurons, just waiting for a grand entrance into one of his True Sociopath posts.14
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, has also found Greenland to be a fun playground. His company, Cantor Fitzgerald, invested in Greenland mining company Critical Metals Corp many years ago, according to Forbes Magazine. Lutnick dodged the conflict-of-interest game by transferring his Cantor shares to his kids, so there’s no problem here. Nothing to see at all.
Carla Sands is now the cheerleader for Trump’s Greenland attacks
Carla Sands has moved on to other things since leaving her role as U.S. ambassador to Greenland. Such as promoting Trump’s push into Greenland.
She added this Facebook post just a day ago:
Yep, his “work to secure the Western Hemisphere! And Greenland, too!”
For Trump, work means sitting in his lair at 3 am issuing forth noxious tweets, but sure, Carla, blather on. She does so here, if you have the stomach for listening.
Now that his generals have reportedly told Trump they won’t draw up plans for taking Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, Trump has turned to saying to Europe, “If you won’t give us Greenland, I’ll huff and puff and make Americans pay more for European goods!”
As much as 25% more.
The man is an idiot who will die soon.
But the oligarchs will find a way to extract Greenland’s resources and ruin the lives of the people who live there long after the toxic bubbles in Trump’s brain blow his cranium apart.
As for Carla’s next move? We’ll find out. Now that she’s actively cheering Trump on in Trump media as a private citizen, it’s something that is bound to reward her and her heirs for years to come.
You know what? I haven’t even touched upon the fact that one of the dangers in trying to extract all this rare earth is that it exposes uranium. But hey, I guess the founders of Greenland were prognosticators when they named their capital city Nuuk. With Trump in office, it can finally live up to its name.
Footnotes
IMDb. “Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell (1988) - User Reviews - IMDb,” 2022. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097174/reviews/?featured=rw0268711&ref_=tt_ururv_c_2.
In fairness, she became a chiropractor first, so she had some spunk and ambition, which she later demonstrated as ambassador to Greenland and beyond. But it’s more fun to make her look a little shady, so I am reserving this part of her bio to a footnote, where I honestly think it belongs, given her current escapades.
AllGov. “U.S. Ambassador to Denmark: Who Is Carla Sands?,” 2017. http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/us-ambassador-to-denmark-who-is-carla-sands-171016?news=860334.
Government of Greenland document on Greenland minerals. There will be several references to this, so get used to the word, “ibid,” which is bibliography-speak for, “previously referenced source.”
As promised: Government of Greenland, ibid
Chant, Tim De. “Exclusive: KoBold Metals, Which Uses AI to Help Find Critical Minerals for the Energy Transition, Raises $491M | TechCrunch.” TechCrunch, October 7, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/07/ai-powered-critical-mineral-startup-kobold-metals-has-raised-491m-filings-reveal/.
Techcrunch, ibid
Chant, Tim De. “KoBold Used AI to Find Copper — Now Investors Are Piling in to the Tune of $537M | TechCrunch.” TechCrunch, January 2, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/02/kobold-used-ai-to-find-copper-now-investors-are-piling-in-to-the-tune-of-537m/.
and
Tracxn.com. “KoBold Metals - 2025 Funding Rounds & List of Investors - Tracxn,” November 2025. https://tracxn.com/d/companies/kobold-metals/__KK3gPYnO6jr7fYSlEpK6nkY-72DH8gB2QJpVVQGuNZg/funding-and-investors#investors.
80mile.com, 2025. Public Relations release: https://www.80mile.com/regulatory-news/81034.
Londonstockexchange.com. “London Stock Exchange | London Stock Exchange,” 2026. https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/80M/update-on-disko-nuussuaq-ni-cu-co-pge-project/16445433.
Forbes, ibid
The interwebs are full of rumors about a city called Praxis Thiel wants to build, but the location is everywhere, from the Mediterranean to Greenland. I’ll leave it up to internet sleuths to try to sort it all out.
Levy, Rachael, and Alexandra Ulmer. “Exclusive: Greenland ‘Freedom City’? Rich Donors Push Trump for a Tech Hub up North.” Reuters, April 10, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/greenland-freedom-city-rich-donors-push-trump-tech-hub-up-north-2025-04-10/.