We’ve got a short (10-item) “weekend special edition” for you this morning. Enjoy.
THANK YOU to subscribing contributors ACS and ERW, whose $7.50 in contributions yesterday bring our year-end fundraiser total to $1,423.84!
Our goal is $5,501. Once we’ve raised $2,750.50, supporter GL will “match funds” for the other half. But we need YOU to get us to that halfway point at:
Please support the freedom movement’s daily newspaper, and have a great weekend!
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review News Digest / Freedom News Daily
PS: Would you like RRND/FND to have a “real” office? I’ve been working from a home office in whatever corner I can find for 30 years now, but …
My family is in the process of moving — after 13 years of renting since moving to Florida, we bought ourselves a little place. Not TERRIBLY little, but this weekend I hope to look at used “camper trailers.” The idea I have is to park one out back and use it as my office, maybe (MAYBE) as a podcast studio, and for general “man cave” purposes. If I find what I’m looking for, it will cost $1-2k. If you’d like to help out with that, donating to our year-end fundraiser is the way to go about it!
“A man accused of planting pipe bombs in Washington on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in court for the first time Friday afternoon, though the brief hearing offered no additional details into his possible motivations. Brian Cole Jr., 30, was charged Thursday with transporting an explosive device in interstate commerce and attempted malicious destruction by means of an explosive material. Dozens of FBI agents and teams in camouflage apprehended him at his Northern Virginia home. … The arrest, nearly five years after the discovery of the pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican national committees, marked a breakthrough in a case mired by conspiracy theories and dead ends.” (12/05/25)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alexander William Salter
“Markets want predictable interest rates. However, that isn’t the Fed’s job. Officially, the Fed has a three-part mandate: full employment, price stability, and moderate interest rates. An unspoken agreement between politicians and central bankers has made this a de facto dual mandate focusing on labor markets and price levels. Managing the money supply addresses both concerns. We need to change how we think about monetary policy, however, or else we’re setting ourselves up to get repeatedly fooled. Adjusting interest rate targets is a means to an end. The interest rate is not the price of money, but rather the price of time. When you borrow, you’re renting capital. Interest rates reflect the value we place on having capital right now, as opposed to later.” (12/05/25)
“There is no ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, even though an agreement reached on October 9 supposedly established one. The Israeli assault on the Strip continues, albeit at a reduced pace from what it was for most of the past two years. By one count, Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 591 times between October 10 and December 2 with a combination of air and artillery attacks and direct shootings. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that during this period, 347 Palestinians have been killed and 889 injured. The pattern of casualties including women and children as well as journalists continues. Meanwhile, it is hard to find any documented Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip during the same period, beyond an early shooting incident at Rafah in which Israel says a soldier was killed and Hamas says it had nothing to do with it.” (12/05/25)
“The death toll from a drone strike on civilian facilities in the Kalogi locality of Sudan’s South Kordofan state has risen to 79, including 43 children, a local official said on Friday. Issam al-Din al-Sayed Angalo, Executive Director of Kalogi, blamed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for the attack, which he described as one of the deadliest in the region since the conflict began. A drone fired three missiles at the town in the eastern part of the state on Thursday. The first missile struck a kindergarten, causing initial casualties, Angalo said. A second missile was fired as residents gathered to rescue the wounded. A third strike hit the rural hospital where victims were being transported, killing and wounding more people and destroying large sections of the facility.” (12/05/25)
“Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement — in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged. I no longer look at it that way. … taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly — one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.” (12/05/25)
“Although much has already been said, I can’t not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust. What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime’s mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are. So what’s the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish.” (12/05/25)
“The Supreme Court will decide if President Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship can stand, the court announced on Friday. If the justices agree with the president, the court could overrule a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and upheld by SCOTUS over a century ago. … The president’s executive order leaned into a once-fringe belief that children born to undocumented immigrants have no right to U.S. citizenship as a way to deliver on his promises to cut down on illegal [sic] immigration. However, the 14th Amendment automatically offers citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of the citizenship status of their parents.” (12/05/25)
