Forget Greenland. Trump and Musk’s real WWIII is an all-out war on the truth.

In a world where the news doesn’t stop getting more bat-guano crazy just because it’s Christmas, where a phony war between the United States and Denmark consumes more electrons than the heartbreakingly real ones in Gaza and Ukraine, you might have missed a major escalation in the world conflict that matters most.

The unrelenting and wildly successful war on facts, also known as truth.

A man with 11 kids who spends Christmas Eve tweeting, Elon Musk — the ketamine-fueled Bond villain and richest human in world history who emerged from the Trojan horse of America’s 2024 presidential election hell-bent on world domination — showed yet again that it’s never enough for him.

Sure, his $44 billion dagger into the heart of the U.S. political conversation by buying flawed-but-freewheeling Twitter and turning it into a right-wing cesspool called X helped drag Donald Trump over the Nov. 5 finish line, but what about those pesky pockets of fact-diggers and truth-tellers he hasn’t bought or destroyed yet?

No wonder the $436 billion man wants to crush Wikipedia (yearly budget: $177 million), the nonprofit internet encyclopedia that uses a messy but open and democratic editing process to grind toward truth. Musk, whose feuds with a website where he can’t buy and bury details from his antisemitic tweets to allegedly asking a SpaceX employee to “have his babies” are not new, fired off a series of new salvos.

“Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority,” wrote Musk atop a tweet from a right-wing font of disinformation called Libs of TikTok. In typical fashion, Musk’s case against the Wikimedia Foundation was based on a gross misrepresentation of its budget, a claim that its efforts to ensure unbiased political entries in contentious, far-flung elections or to build a less-sexist encyclopedia are proof of the MAGA movement’s chief boogeyman, “DEI.”

Musk — who basically set more than $30 billion on fire by deliberately destroying Twitter’s once-high valuation — has also offered $1 billion for Wikipedia, although it’s unclear whether he actually wants to own it or just change its name to a second-grade-level penis joke. The world dictator of disinformation wants to devalue reality-based information any way he can, because, as Wikipedia beat journalist Stephen Harrison wrote in 2022, the site “occupies what appears to be an increasingly rare internet niche: a place where billionaires cannot purchase their preferred version of events, nor own the means of conversation.”

The good news is that Wikipedia is not for sale. But that’s cold comfort in a multiple-front battle for truth that Musk and Trump — tag team Legion of Doom on their kayfabe-laced information wrestling mat — are body-slamming everywhere else.

With little fanfare, the recent Musk-initiated, Trump-enabled assault on the federal government funding deal managed to shut down a $61 million-a-year U.S. State Department office — set up in 2016, amid the first wave of Russian election interference — that employed 120 people to combat foreign-generated disinformation.

You know, the kind of folks who might prove useful the next time Russia shoots down a commercial jet and its civilian passengers and tries to pretend it’s a bird strike — or when it tells Black Americans in Milwaukee to stay home in the next election. But to “President Musk,” these U.S. diplomats were interfering with the only guaranteed constitutional right that matters — their right to tell lies.

This significant surrender in the war against propaganda, and the campaign against a holdout pocket of resistance in Wikipedia, got scant attention in a mainstream media that was decimated both morally and economically over the course of 2024. Instead, the scribes at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere were on the scavenger hunt for a new batch of shiny objects planted by the nominal president-elect: wild threats to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland and maybe even Canada.

Forget Greenland. My strong — and maybe naive? — hunch is that Denmark’s vast, mineral-rich Arctic territory won’t prove to be 2025’s Sudetenland, but Trump’s blustery and out-of-left-field pitch for American lebensraum is important as the leading edge of Team MAGA’s real World War III — against any consensus on objective truth.

Much like the global upheaval of the 1940s, the real Trump-Musk war is already well underway, waged in every possible theater. In a world where content is king, Trump and his Lion King hyenas alliance with billionaire oligarchs has now bought and ruined the most prominent real-time information exchange in Twitter turned X — while fighting relentlessly to destroy traditional newsroom or network journalism, through lawsuits, licensing threats, or nonstop verbal attacks, on Musk-owned X or elsewhere.

I’m sure that even the late, great George Orwell would have been amazed and impressed at the ways Trump and Musk have been able to portray these crusades as a battle for free speech, rather than the mother of all conflicts to destroy it. Here, too, we saw a watershed moment this past week as Trump and a lawyer for his incoming administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to undo the ridiculous, looming ban on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok (a colossal blunder by Dems led by President Joe Biden, but that’s for another day).

Today’s TikTok, ironically, seems a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — a wide-open frontier of information that can be fake or scammy or bitingly real, mixing dude-bro Trump agitprop with vital pleas for sanity and truth. But it’s smart politics for the president-elect to position himself as TikTok’s savior.

That’s because, in the big picture, TikTok is part of the unreality-based world that flourishes from your uncle’s Facebook feed to YouTube influencers to the supermarket checkout line — the toxic miasma that got a convicted felon reelected by the most uninformed electorate in modern U.S. history.

While championing TikTok, the MAGA movement has worked with remarkable success to undo a movement for professional, trained fact-checking that arose after 2016’s tsunami of disinformation. A prime example is the site NewsGuard, whose ambitious, nonpartisan goals of promoting truth-seeking newsrooms have been undermined by the same unholy alliance of Big Tech and congressional Republicans that has stopped or weakened similar efforts from Harvard to Homeland Security.

» READ MORE: America’s choice: Do voters want to live in reality, or a dangerous dream world? | Will Bunch

The tactical goals for Musk (lower taxes, the end of government regulations, preferential deals with the U.S. government, and — yes, Bond fans — global domination) and for Trump (disappearing his criminal cases while monetizing the American presidency) are very much in sight. Their strategy for getting there — the real WWIII that doesn’t involve storming Panama — is the nuclear demolition of objective reality.

And so the undemocracy’s Legion of Doom is winning WWIII when American voters are as badly confused and misinformed as those the Washington Post interviewed this past week, like Trump voter Lori Mosura of New Castle, Pa., who barely subsists largely on Social Security and food stamps. She said, “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.” This as Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their faux commission called DOGE are scheming to somehow slash $2 trillion from the U.S. budget.

They are winning their World War III when the elite media takes seriously Trump’s obviously fake bluster about taking over Canada or lowering grocery prices (or that Trump invented the word groceries), or when ABC News-owning Disney Corp. grovels with $15 million for a Trump library grift, or when owners of major newspapers spike pro-democracy editorials or invent insane contraptions like a “bias meter.”

And the less the media — or citizens who prefer to live in a reality-based world — fight back, the worse things are going to get. This week, a 39-year-old taxi driver and self-described ex-Marine from Grand Junction, Colo., followed a TV journalist of Pacific Islander descent some 40 miles and then physically attacked him after allegedly yelling, “This is Trump’s America now!” and “I took an oath to protect this country from people like you!”

The fact that 2024 was also one of the worst years, globally (and largely due to Gaza), for killing journalists since modern record-keeping should be a wake-up call for what can happen here. But there is also hope, and not just because the post-Christmas Trumpist meltdown on X — pitting the billionaire oligarchs of New MAGA against the Classic MAGA of white supremacy — led to Musk’s blatant efforts to silence his online critics and in the process make an utter mockery of his free speech mantle.

Not surprisingly, donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from everyday folks outraged by Musk’s renewed assaults have risen sharply since Christmas, perhaps by as much as 400%, although the exact figure is unclear. The aftermath of Trump’s election victory has also sparked a broader conversation about getting smart about fighting disinformation — by supporting local news and nonprofit (and thus non-billionaire) newsrooms and creating alternative ways of getting reality bites to an electorate that is now feasting on fake news.

It’s past time to fight their war and defeat them on their turf, which thankfully is not in the frigid glaciers of Greenland.