Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“What was once dismissed as a joke — ‘Santa is watching’ — has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments — lists that never disappear. The shift is subtle but profound. Innocence is no longer presumed. Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect. This is the surveillance state in action.” (12/18/25)
“The war on drugs has always been stupid and evil; its application to marijuana particularly so. Far too many people have spent far too many years in prison for possession and use of a common and benign plant, and taxpayers have been mulcted of far too much money to put them there.” (12/18/25)
“For years, pointing out the obvious was considered impolite: America’s biggest, most distortionary transfer of wealth does not flow from elites to the working class. Nor does it show up as corporate welfare. It flows from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy. It’s the defining injustice of our fiscal regime, the largest driver of our government debt, and the quiet engine behind the malaise of Millennials and Gen Z. More than a decade ago, Reason editor at large Nick Gillespie and I wrote a piece arguing that Social Security and Medicare had together become the great cause of America’s generational inequity. We noted that senior households were wealthier than ever while young households still working to make ends meet had to prop them up further.” (12/18/25)
“[George L.] Mosse had a particular genius for identifying second and third-rate thinkers that nevertheless had deep cultural impact, particularly in the half-century before Hitler’s rise. Figures like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn easily fade from the historian’s view because they were gauche and intellectually unserious; revisited today, their works are easily dismissed as trash. It’s far more interesting to debate real philosophical luminaries like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, whose genuinely groundbreaking work did nevertheless have real connections to fascism. Those thinkers are extremely abstruse, however. Normal people don’t read or understand them. Mosse grasped the importance of looking at the ‘sub-intellectual realm,’ where cranks and grifters peddle conspiracy theories and paranoid just-so stories. These, he suggests, were the men who truly paved the way for Hitler’s rise.” (12/18/25)
“Every morning, hundreds of millions of people perform a socially approved ritual. They line up for coffee. They joke about not being functional without caffeine. They openly acknowledge dependence and even celebrate it. No one calls this addiction degenerate. It is framed as productivity, taste, wellness—sometimes even virtue. Now imagine the same professional discreetly using a nicotine pouch before a meeting. The reaction is very different. This is treated as a vice, something vaguely shameful, associated with weakness, poor judgment, or public health risk. From a scientific perspective, this distinction makes little sense.” (12/18/25)
“Two students were murdered by an unknown monster at Brown University over the weekend and the odds are pretty high you don’t know their names. I don’t blame you; you don’t have to, and, unless you knew them, you have no real reason to. But I bet you know the names of some of those left-wing gun control students who’ve formed anti-Second Amendment groups and have gone on to become progressive cable news celebrities. Seems odd, doesn’t it? Until you realize that not all victims are created equally. It’s a deviant sect on the left that only cares about people’s well-being if those people agree with them; everyone else is disposable. Unless, that is, Democrats can use their deaths to advance their agenda, then they’ll pretend to care.” (12/18/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“I can’t help but feel very sorry for the Venezuelan people. Imagine living under a brutal and corrupt illegitimately elected dictatorship, a national-security state form of government, and a full socialist economic system. Oh, but unfortunately, that’s not all. Imagine also having to live in a country in which the most powerful military empire in world history is also waging war against the citizenry. That’s what life is like for average Venezuelans. On one side of the vise is their brutal political regime and socialist system, and on the other side of the vise is the U.S. Empire. Both sides of the vise continue to tighten.” (12/18/25)
Source: Show-Me Institute
by Susan Pendergrass & Cory Koedel
“Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states must identify unsafe schools and notify families of students who attend them that they have the right to move their child to a safer public school. This requirement is called the Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO). In Missouri, it isn’t working. The problem comes down to one word in state policy. Right now, Missouri only classifies a school as unsafe if it has a high rate of violence and a high number of expulsions for three years in a row. Because expulsions almost never happen, the conditions are almost impossible to meet. As a result, no school is ever designated as unsafe, and families aren’t allowed to transfer out. Changing one word, from ‘AND’ to ‘OR,’ would finally make the rule work the way federal law intended.” (12/18/25)
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Shaka Mitchell & Gary W Houchens
“As education freedom sweeps across the country, Kentucky stands out as an unfortunate bulwark against innovation, improved academic outcomes, and parental choice. For decades, Kentucky families have watched neighboring states take bold steps to expand educational opportunity while policymakers in Frankfort debate the same old questions. … Now, a new federal tax credit scholarship program offers a rare chance to leap forward — and it’s time for Kentucky to take it.” (12/18/25)
“From a psychological perspective, it offered a textbook case of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’[s] theory of the stages people go through as they grapple with impending mortality. Trump displayed not just one but all three of the first stages observed by the psychiatrist in dying subjects: denial, anger and bargaining. He denied reality. He ranted angrily. He promised checks of $1,776 each to every member of the military, even though he, as president, has no authority to independently do so. And, as it turns out, of course, he hadn’t. … If you’d otherwise heard an aging relative howling at the moon as Trump did, you would gently remove any sharp implements from their immediate vicinity and start to talk to them about the nice men who would soon be arriving with the butterfly nets. Breaks with reality like we saw Wednesday night usually end with Thorazine drips and soothing elevator music, after all.” (12/18/25)
