Sunday, January 25, 2026 · 64 newsletters

Minneapolis Breaks the Funding Deal

ICE · Minneapolis · Davos · AI · China · Europe · Shutdown

Published on Sunday, January 25, 2026.

Pulled from ~70 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. A heavy Saturday cut, organized by trend.

The Big Story: Another Minneapolis Shooting Collapses the Funding Deal

This was the story almost every political writer led with. Federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old American citizen and Minneapolis VA nurse, in broad daylight on Nicollet Avenue Saturday morning. He is the second US citizen killed this month in Minneapolis during ICE operations, after Renee Good was shot earlier in January. Lincoln Square led with Brian Daitzman's detailed reconstruction, including the Hannah Arendt epigraph about propaganda's contempt for facts.

The political consequence arrived within hours. Semafor DC flashed that Senate Democrats now plan to block any funding package that bundles DHS, and that Chuck Schumer said Saturday night that "Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included." A partial shutdown Friday is now the working assumption. Burgess Everett's reporting names Cortez Masto, Kaine, and Rosen as the swing votes who flipped after Pretti's death.

The progressive case for blocking. Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box argued the cleanest version: "Democrats cannot fund ICE after what has happened in Minnesota in recent weeks." Rick Wilson was angrier and shorter ("America's Gestapo Kills Again"). Jon Favreau at Crooked Media wrote a long piece on why silence is no longer an option, framing this as the first quarter of a three-year fight. Sam Osterhout at Lincoln Square focused on the five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, taken by ICE in Columbia Heights and reportedly used as bait for his parents. Gov Brief Today collected the parallel cases: a 7-year-old detained from a Portland ER, four children as young as five taken into custody, child care subsidies frozen until a judge intervened.

The legal and forensic frame. Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark hosted Andrew Weissmann (the former Mueller prosecutor and FBI general counsel) calling for a real investigation, focusing on First and Second Amendment questions and the government's contradictory statements. Pretti was a lawful gun owner; Minnesota is open-carry; the videos don't show an attempted shooting.

The escalation context. The Flip Side's week in review flagged that Trump had already ordered roughly 1,500 active-duty soldiers in Alaska on prepare-to-deploy status for Minnesota and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. Lincoln Square's Trippi Show noted Trump's coalition is now polling worse than 2020. Jim Swift at The Bulwark and Dan Pfeiffer's mailbag both read JD Vance's Minneapolis remarks as a tell that the administration knows the mask is slipping with swing voters.

Davos and the New World Order

The other dominant thread, in a much different register. Ethereum Weekly framed it as: Trump openly rejected the existing international order this week, and crypto's presence at WEF felt less like a curiosity than a signal. David Hoffman's piece argues Ethereum represents what's left when global coordination fragments rather than consolidates.

Paul Krugman's interview with Gabriel Zucman was the substantive piece of the day on this thread. Zucman: the EU's 2025 decision not to retaliate against Trump's 15% across-the-board tariff was the original sin, and Davos this week was the continuation. Dan Kurtz-Phelan in Foreign Affairs elevated Matthias Matthijs and Nathalie Tocci's "How Europe Lost," whose argument is that Europe's appeasement is "a self-defeating trap" that feeds the far right inside Europe itself.

Marc Elias at Democracy Docket opened with Mark Carney's line from the same week ("the old order is not coming back, we shouldn't mourn it, nostalgia is not a strategy") and used it to argue America's identity is too entangled in nostalgia to clearly see what's happening. Stuart Stevens at Lincoln Square wrote the most personal version, an essay on his father's WWII service and what Trump said in Davos about American allies.

Iran and the Military Posture

Connected, but a distinct beat. The Epoch Times reported Trump's announcement of a "big force of naval ships" heading toward Iran. Gov Brief Today's curated headlines added the Treasury sanctioning nine Iranian "shadow fleet" oil ships, and the running fatality count from the December 28 protests now near 5,000 per Human Rights Activists in Iran.

China: The PLA Purge Goes to the Top

Bill Bishop at Sinocism led with the biggest China story of the day: Zhang Youxia (Politburo member, CMC vice chair, longtime Xi ally) and Liu Zhenli (Joint Staff chief) are both under formal investigation. The speed of the official announcement, days after rumors surfaced, is unusual; the He Weidong case took months. Bishop's question is whether the leadership felt it had to get ahead of something destabilizing.

Separately, Trivium China's podcast covered two threads worth tracking: financial regulators starting 2026 with a flurry (margin hike, relending expansion, small-business support) and Beijing's intervention in Meta's announced acquisition of Manus, the Chinese AI startup, which has bigger implications for the China AI ecosystem.

AI: Davos Talk Meets Production Reality

A split day. The Davos half lived in Guillermo Flor's AI Davos recap, which walked through Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis on "the day after AGI" (the self-improvement loop closing or not), Nadella and Larry Fink on AI as a platform shift, Alex Karp on AI exposing institutions that don't actually work, and Musk on robots. Flor's read: the disagreement isn't really about intelligence, it's about how much physical reality slows the feedback loop down.

Monetization is becoming the real story. Contrary Research ran a deep piece on OpenAI's January 16 announcement that ads are coming to lower-tier consumer outputs, noting that 97% of consumer AI usage is currently unpaid and that the freemium model is structurally unprofitable. The implicit question: what does an ad-supported model do to the product?

On the engineering floor. Runtime's Product Saturday covered Cognition rolling out a code-review tool for its Devin agent (an admission that agent output needs an audit layer) and Obsidian's response to the post-Salesloft wave of SaaS integration attacks. Trung Phan at SatPost flagged OpenAI's blog post arguing revenue is now almost directly correlated to compute, ahead of Sam Altman's reported $50B Middle East raise at an $800B valuation.

The deepfake economics flip. Michael Girdley walked through the new economics: deepfakes average less than $2 to make, average loss per incident around $600K, and reported scams jumped from 487 in Q2 2025 to 2,031 in Q3. SpyTalk's James Grady covered the fake video generated around Renee Good's killing, and a new poll showing 64% of Americans blame AI for false information driving political violence. The Markup's Andrew Losowsky wrote a useful operator's piece on what AI slop looks like in a real job applicant pool (400+ applications in 12 hours, recycled phone numbers, .dev@gmail addresses, identical resume design patterns).

Markets, Macro and the SaaS Question

David Cummings wrote what I think is the sharpest framing of the SaaS multiple compression debate: the real threat isn't AI absorbing budget or vibe-coded internal tools, it's a million new SaaS startups built by non-technical subject-matter experts as the cost of building software approaches zero. Paul at Hello Operator made the parallel case from the positioning side. Guillermo Flor's other newsletter ran a problem-first breakdown of Airbnb, Stripe, Uber and Notion plus 15 unsolved problems he thinks can produce decacorns in 2026.

CB Insights dropped State of Fintech 2025, with prediction markets and crypto driving some of the year's biggest rounds and record M&A heading into 2026. This Week in Fintech led with WeLab's $220M from HSBC and Prudential, a notable Hong Kong checkpoint. McKinsey Classics republished its scenario planning piece, which lands differently in a week where the global order is openly fragmenting.

NYC and the Storm

Gothamist led with Mamdani urging New Yorkers to stay home as a blizzard rolls in, with a deep freeze behind it (potentially the coldest stretch in eight years). The companion FDNY 4-alarm story out of the Bronx is the kind of thing that lands harder when the storm comes. The Daily Skimm leaned into the weekend with Rachel Mansfield's French Onion Soup Meatballs and Hilary Duff playing a "Certified Millennial Banger" live for the first time.

Saturday Grace Notes

Why is this interesting had Tom Whitwell's "52 Things I Learned in 25" (including that nearly 0.7% of US exports by value are human blood products) and the Kajitsu playlist Sakamoto made for the defunct vegan restaurant. PUNCH flagged a tequila "bastard Martini" and hot cocktails for the snow weekend. Ottolenghi wrote a small love letter to lemons ("little cathedrals, fruit for dreaming") with a saffron pudding and a no-waste pickle. Wendy MacNaughton at DrawTogether closed her noticing series on keys and the people who carry them. Neil Pasricha was at #897: the thunderous whoosh of a flock of Canada Geese taking off at once.

The GIST Sports Biz profiled Annika Malacinski's fight to add women's Nordic combined to the Winter Olympics, the last men-only sport on the program. Alex Brogan ran an Aristotle Onassis profile for the Saturday boldness slot.

Three Takeaways for You

The Pretti shooting has done what nine months of normal politics couldn't: it broke the bipartisan funding deal. Watch Friday closely. A shutdown that runs through DHS specifically is a very different political event than the 43-day generic shutdown of last fall, because the cause is now legible to anyone watching video on their phone.

The Davos through-line and the Minneapolis through-line are the same story told at two altitudes. Mark Carney and Marc Elias are making the same argument that Trump's Europe critics are making: nostalgia is not a strategy, the old order isn't coming back, and pretending otherwise feeds the thing you're afraid of. That argument is now showing up in places that don't usually talk to each other (Foreign Affairs, Democracy Docket, Krugman, Lincoln Square).

If you only read three pieces today, I'd suggest: Marc Elias on nostalgia as Achilles' heel (frame-setting), Bill Bishop on the PLA purge (the geopolitical wildcard), and David Cummings on the real threat to SaaS valuations (operator framing for the year ahead).