“Next month, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr will testify before the Senate Commerce Committee over his role in browbeating ABC into briefly suspending late-night ‘comedian’ Jimmy Kimmel. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Kimmel made stupid and insensitive comments that prompted Carr to wade into the fray, threatening to use his regulatory power to punish the TV host and his network. That prompted bipartisan condemnation of government interference and the upcoming Senate hearing. Now, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wants to go further, suggesting five legal changes to make censorship by government officials more difficult.” (11/12/25)
“Were Milei’s radical reforms saved at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer? Bessant was asked this, yesterday, directly on MSNBC, and had a response: ‘Do you know what a swap line is?’ I had to brush up on it. … A currency swap is a financial agreement between two parties to exchange principal amounts and interest payments in different currencies over a set period — a temporary loan in one currency backed by collateral in another, designed to provide liquidity, hedge exchange rate risks, or access cheaper funding without the full risks of outright borrowing. ‘In most bailouts you don’t make money,’ Bessent said. ‘The U.S. government made money.’ In an exchange, both parties gain. But in any exchange involving extended spans of time, there is risk, so any initial win for Treasury could be wasted by a failure of Milei’s course.” (11/12/25)
“Regardless of who or what political party is in power, the untouchable layer does not seem to change much, from marble-walled compounds in Dubai or Bahrain to gilded palaces in Palm Springs — and a billionaire’s private island where other billionaires visit and do whatever they want, no matter whom they hurt. Untouchables enrich one another, protect one another’s power and keep each others’ secrets. At this societal layer, Democratic and Republican parties become irrelevant, and debate is merely theater. There is only one party, and we are not in it. … President Trump promised full disclosures and investigations into Epstein, then backtracked on his promise.” (11/12/25)
“Rural voters may be disproportionately dependent on certain kinds of government services, and their families often depend on income and benefits associated with government employment, but they are not left-wing radicals either as a matter of policy preference or as a matter of temperament. … Trump did not run in those counties as a socialist talking about income redistribution and intersectionality: He ran as a guy bitching about high prices at the grocery store. Rural America listened. And Trump, being Trump, has repaid rural America for its support by screwing over America’s farmers …. There are votes there in the countryside to be had by those willing to fight for them — they probably should not send the incoming mayor of New York City to do the asking, but one would think that would be obvious enough even for Democrats.” (11/12/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Americans living today have lived their entire lives under governmental systems and policies that have come with perpetual war, interventionism, embargoes, sanctions, coups, state-sponsored assassinations, extrajudicial murders, foreign aid to brutal regimes, torture, invasions, occupations, tariffs, trade wars, immigration controls, an immigration police state, wars of aggression, out of control federal spending and debt, and massive infringements on civil liberties. From the first grade on up, Americans have been inculcated with the notion that all this is ‘freedom.’ As adults and oftentimes to the day they die, they enthusiastically stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, sing the Star Spangled Banner, and thank the troops, the CIA, and the NSA for protecting their ‘freedom.’ Given such, I believe it’s important to periodically set forth the libertarian ideal with respect to all this statism.” (11/12/25)
“I can still see and hear it in my mind’s eye: cruise missiles skimming low over Baghdad during the Gulf War, the air vibrating, my voice raised above the roar and the crack of anti-aircraft fire. Back then, we were reporters, not presenters. We didn’t measure risk in ratings or clicks or choose our words from lists approved by diversity, equity and inclusion committees. We told it as it was: raw, immediate and real. Today, CNN faces yet another ‘strategic reset’ under David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery. The network confronts a reckoning far more profound than shrinking ratings or revenue. It must decide whether it stands for good, independent journalism. To my generation, good journalism matters. We bear witness. We write and broadcast the first draft of history from the front, not the studio floor or some convenient live-shot location well behind the lines.” (11/11/25)
“History’s gears are lubricated by gore. Witness America’s Revolutionary War, whose continuing reverberations have done more to improve the course of human events than any other event in history. The war was fueled by crystalline ideas couched in elegant prose authored by members of the Colonial upper crust. But from 1777 on, most bleeding was done by ‘the poorest of the poor — jobless laborers and landless tenants, second and third sons without hope of an inheritance, debtors and British deserters, indentured servants and apprentices, felons hoping to win pardons.’ So says a new telling of America’s origin story, which is a tapestry of suffering, viciousness, selflessness and nobility. Beginning Sunday, in six two-hour episodes on PBS, ‘The American Revolution’ will immerse viewers in an often bewildering, sometimes dismaying, but ultimately exhilarating documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt.” (11/12/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“One of the craziest things happening right now is how there’s been report after report confirming that Jeffrey Epstein really was an Israeli intelligence operative, based on publicly available documents, and yet it’s had no measurable impact on mainstream media or politics. Over the last month and a half, Drop Site News has published four reports about Epstein’s intelligence ties …. In the latest article, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussein write, ‘we’re left wondering why the rest of the media, which has demonstrated no lack of excitement when it comes to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, has all of a sudden lost its reporting capacity, in the face of reams of publicly available newsworthy documents.'” (11/12/25)
