Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s such an insult to our intelligence how Israel supporters pretend it’s the WAY pro-Palestine protests are happening that they object to, and not the protests themselves. Like if protesters were saying different chants they’d be totally cool with opposition to Israel’s crimes. They’re like, ‘We’re not trying to suppress your free speech and stomp out criticism of Israel, we’re just concerned about slogans like ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea!’ We’re worried that expressions of support for Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran that we’ve seen in some demonstrations are going to cause acts of terrorism!’ Bullshit. Lies. They’re fucking lying. If they weren’t concern-trolling about ‘globalize the intifada’ they’d make up some other excuse to express their concern, and they know it. Their objection is to criticism of Israel, not to the way those criticisms are being expressed.” (12/29/25)
Source: Orange County Register
by the editorial board
“If President Donald Trump’s tariffs and trade wars are so great for the American economy, then why does he have to shell out, as he did this month, $12 billion to farmers adversely affected by tariffs and trade wars? The simple answer is of course that tariffs and the trade wars they lead to are never great for our economy, or for that of any other country. They are additional taxes — as if we needed additional taxes — on the American consumer, and no one else.” (12/28/25)
“A recent job inquiry we received at the construction company I work for illustrates the bad incentives caused by modern federal disability programs. The man who contacted us has been in and out of illness for years — enough to qualify for disability insurance. Yet he is still capable of work, doing part-time carpentry for others. But we cannot procure him because of his disability status. Hiring him could expose both him and our company to legal risk, and he cannot license or insure his business without jeopardizing his benefits, since such programs treat work as evidence of fraud rather than rehabilitation. His only rational choice is to remain officially ‘disabled’ — and not work at all, at least not on the books. There are many such cases.” (12/28/25)
“Dante wrote that the ‘greatest sorrow is the memory of earlier good times when we are going through a bad time.’ We live in fear of the tyrant’s dungeon, but we remember a time when we weren’t even aware of the existence of the dungeons. We may never have been as free as we supposed, but at least we felt free. And when you feel free, you act as if you were. You speak, you write, you protest. Can you still do that today? I am an immigrant, a journalist, and an academic: the bullseye in the Venn diagram of everything this administration hates. As a writer, I ask myself, what is my dharma? — which is Sanskrit for duty.” (12/28/25)
“Jesus Christ was a shaggy-haired anarchist troubadour, a traveling mystical heretic delivering muckraking rants against the rich and the pious. Far from what the revisionists in Rome would have you believe, Jesus was a disgruntled Jew who despised the Old Testament and the gangsters who spewed it. Christ was hostile to pretty much all authority; banks, kings, empires … But he despised no seat of power more than ‘Moses’ seat’ in the temples of ancient Roman Judea. He went from town to town, passing right by these so-called houses of God and the pompous bigots who frequented them and then headed straight for the local red-light districts to rally whores, lepers and eunuchs against them. Christ taught these people that God was a divine spark within them and that they didn’t require holy men to access enlightenment.” (12/28/25)
“‘A single step’ beyond the limits of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson warned that just one solitary act lays the foundation for unlimited power. Consider the road to 1776. It wasn’t about a tiny tax on tea; it was about the claimed authority to levy it. From the Revolution back to ancient Greece, the Founders knew the score: once government seizes power, it keeps growing and it never gives it back.” (12/28/25)
“We live in the age of the permanent campaign, and everywhere I turn I see Democrats, actual Republicans (as opposed to Trumpists), and supposed ‘independents’ looking forward to next November’s midterm congressional elections with hope, even excitement: Democrats will take the US Senate and the House, they hope, thwarting Donald Trump’s policy agenda. The odds are not with those hopes or that excitement. … Government THROUGH politics is not going to get us out of the mess we’ve been putting and keeping ourselves in WITH politics for more than a century now.” (12/27/25)
“The Republican Party that I joined in the 1980s (and later left) espoused a straightforward set of principles. It believed in free markets, limited government, peace through strength in dealing with international aggressors, and ‘traditional’ values. Sure, the last one was nebulous and the party often was hypocritical, but these core ideas were the key to its eventual resurgence. … Engaging in nostalgia is a hazard of growing older, but one need not be misty-eyed to compare that Grand Old Party to the current freak show. Sure, Democrats were pretty awful during that era (and embraced views surprisingly common in Republican circles today) and largely remain so, but the GOP was the voice of sanity. With the GOP’s dark and nasty pivot, advocates for those age-old ideals have nowhere to turn.” (12/26/25)
Source: Tenth Amendment Center
by Joe Wolverton, II
“There are many events in the history of the formation of this Republic that go unnoticed, unremembered, and unheralded. Today is a chance to remedy that and remember the Regulators. As if cut from today’s headlines, patriot farmers and small ranchers in North and South Carolina led a rebellion against armed government officials trying to exercise control over western lands. History has dubbed the uprising the War of the Regulation, the final battle of which happened on May 16 in 1771. The West in this case, of course, was not Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, but the rural counties of the Carolina backcountry. Historian James Whittenburg described the events as ‘the last and greatest of the social upheavals’ that led to the War for Independence.” (12/27/25)
“In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause. Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world — a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais.” (12/26/25)
