“The year is 2029. President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having spent years raging against Fox News as a propaganda organ whose very operation is illegal, has found a pressure point to control it. She enables its sale to owners who are friends of hers, and whose business depends on regulatory favors she has made a practice of doling out to allies. As the new editor in chief of Fox News, the owners install Tim Miller, a skeptic of conservatism who has never previously worked in television news. But then AOC complains that her friends at Fox News aren’t moving fast enough, and the network is still running critical coverage of her. Days later, Miller kills a long-scheduled report showing how AOC may have flouted the Constitution in order to have people tortured. It is safe to say, I think, that conservatives would be upset. … And they would be right.” (12/24/25)
“Merry Christmas! This is the traditional ‘Peace on earth; Good will to men’ season. It’s hard to keep this spirit alive even in the best situations. It’s nearly impossible with government around. Government doesn’t thrive on peace, but on conflict. War is the health of the state, after all. Where there isn’t conflict, government creates it. Where there is already conflict, government fans the flames and uses it against you and your liberty. This is true both overseas and within America’s increasingly militarized borders. You can’t show good will to others while governing them.” (12/24/25)
“It is increasingly apparent that the new political leaders in both Taiwan and Japan are adopting more assertive, even explicitly confrontational, policies toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Their moves are stoking geostrategic tensions throughout the western Pacific. Washington has long regarded Taipei and Tokyo as important U.S. strategic partners. However, the Trump administration also wants to discourage any new military crises in the region. Achieving such a balance may prove to be challenging.” (12/24/25)
“Recall the firing of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the president this summer when a labor report did not shine a favorable light on the job market. Then the Environmental Protection Agency stopped collecting data in the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Now, even economic reports are being cancelled. … Anytime data and statistics are ignored or compromised, the underpinnings of a well-functioning society are at risk of manipulation. Statistics permit the condition of a society to be measured, providing transparency and the ability to draw conclusions. If an activity is not measured, then it is difficult to assess its strengths and limitations. Without statistics, unlawful activities can be hidden and obfuscated. ” (12/24/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson
“Our plane landed at JFK at 10:30 p.m. after a nine-hour flight from Istanbul. … While in line, I had given my fanny pack to my wife, as it held our money and credit cards, and she handed it back to me as we were leaving the building. Instead of snapping it around my waist, I held it in my hand, placing my passport back into the pack. Because of my having to wait for two hours, the last shuttle to our motel had already gone, which meant we had to catch a taxi. … As I began to check into the motel, I realized I didn’t have my pack with me. After checking to see if I had dropped it on the ground, it hit me that it was on the floor of the cab, which was long gone.” (12/24/25)
“Here’s how Claus gains an illicit advantage and creates a trade deficit. Claus is not an American, and he brings his gifts from the North Pole (which is suspiciously close to Canada, a country that threatens U.S. national security). The gifts are produced by elves who don’t have the protections of U.S. labor laws in workshops that aren’t subject to U.S. environmental or safety standards. Claus has stolen jobs from American workers with his industrial policy, which uses Yuletide magic to subsidize the manufacturing and transportation of his exports. This unfair competition allows Claus to flood our country with toys priced lower than anyone else can produce them: $0. American children have been trained not merely to accept but to celebrate the dumping of foreign goods …. The gleeful acceptance of low-priced imports is only one of many symptoms of the failed neoliberal mindset wrecking this great nation.” (12/23/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s just sitting there minding its own business trying to do a little genocide in peace while aggressively lobbying your government to crush your freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and you’re OBSESSING about it for NO REASON. You just hate Jews. That’s the only possible reason you could spend so much time obsessing about this one tiny little harmless country: you’ve got a crazy, irrational fixation on a small abrahamic religion, because you’re a weirdo. Stop saying it’s actually about all the wars and atrocities and apartheid and starving children and lobbying and propaganda and nonstop assaults on your civil rights and your government’s complicity in genocidal abuses …. No. That’s not it. It’s because you get freakishly enraged by small hats. Don’t you know there was a shooting on Bondi Beach?” (12/23/25)
“Late last week, Congress passed and President Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill marks the first time the US military budget officially passed the one trillion dollar mark. Of course, when you add in other military-related spending such as interest on the debt, veterans’ affairs, and military components of other government agencies, the true number is at least one and a half times that amount. To paraphrase the famous 1953 President Eisenhower speech, ‘The Chance for Peace,’ each of these dollars spent on military offense and the maintenance of the US global empire rather than on defense of our own nation is taken from the mouths of the hungry and off the backs of hardworking American families.” (12/22/25)
“There is a contradiction at the heart of the revised justice system that is about to come into being. If trial by jury remains our method of trying the most serious crimes, this implies that it is the best way of litigating criminal cases. If so, then we are accepting that ‘non-serious’ cases are going to be tried using an inferior form of litigation. That will create a two-tier legal system. The irony is that, over the past year, public discourse has been obsessed with what some are calling a crisis of national identity. Does ‘Englishness’ exist? If so, is it good? What are its ethnic boundaries? Yet, jury trial, something that is very important to English history, identity, and our understanding of ourselves — something that has been an ancient, even ancestral, English right, is facing a wrecking ball.” (12/23/25)
“Federal subsidies drive food production, consumption, and — unintentionally — chronic disease. Now we’re being asked to subsidize weight loss drugs to fight what farm policy broke.” (12/23/25)
