“When the St. Petersburg Times first launched PolitiFact in 2007, its purpose was to assess the veracity of statements made by ‘members of Congress, the president, cabinet secretaries, lobbyists, people who testify before Congress and anyone else who speaks up in Washington.’ Fast forward to September 2025, and the trailblazing fact-checker has been reduced to informing us that ‘President Donald Trump is alive.’ Yes, and the sky is blue, and the day ends in y, even if some online randos may be memeing to the contrary. The trivial episode of Trump’s rumored demise illuminates what the future intersection of politics and information might look like. POTUSes and their handlers will go to fantastical lengths to lie about presidential health crises, history demonstrates; what changes over time is how they get away with it.” (for publication 12/25)
Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
by Drew Favakeh
“For years, there have been whispers that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who had ties to key officials in the US and foreign governments, was involved with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. However, the Epstein/Mossad ties were often labeled by US corporate media as ‘unfounded’ … dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ … or said to have been ‘largely manufactured by paranoiacs and attention seekers and credulous believers’ …. It’s true that far-right antisemites like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted a conspiratorial version of the Epstein/Israel connection as part of their bigoted, attention-seeking narratives. But recent investigations by Drop Site News into a major hack targeting Israel revealed that Epstein did play a significant role in brokering multiple deals for Israeli intelligence.” (11/15/25)
“As with Cuba, defenders of the Venezuelan regime have attributed the country’s economic collapse to US sanctions — which they incorrectly call a ‘blockade’ — rather than to the political, economic, and social model imposed by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. That model brought massive state controls, expropriations, corruption, persecution of the opposition and the press, the destruction of the rule of law, and the elimination of judicial guarantees for investment.” (11/14/25)
“As long as conservatives believed that the Epstein files would provide a pretext for persecuting ‘Democrat elites,’ it was politically advantageous to speculate about who might be implicated or suggest that those people had Epstein killed. As soon as it became clear that Trump himself was in said files, all those right-wing media influencers, who had promised their audience a lib bloodbath, began to drop or downplay the issue. The DOJ’s attempt to block the release of more files does not necessarily mean they contain a smoking gun or other damaging information; although Trump has an almost supernatural lack of shame, his overdeveloped sense of pride often motivates irrational and odd behavior. Nevertheless, what we already know about Trump’s relationship with Epstein is disturbing.” (11/14/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“Conservatives have allowed libertarian rhetoric to talk themselves out of attempting to solve problems while not actually doing anything substantively libertarian. So we say ‘Don’t ask for free stuff, move instead’ while jacking up federal spending, running record deficits even during relative peace and prosperity, eroding civil liberties, waging all kinds of wars, and watching the national debt careen past $38 trillion. It is the kind of thing that makes a person think that they are taking crazy pills, as many conservatives now apparently are.” (11/15/25)
“MAGA’s favorite think tank, the Heritage Foundation, is reportedly in the midst of a conservative Civil War after Heritage president Kevin Roberts defended Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes. For readers not steeped in the nuances of the internet’s competing racist factions, Fuentes is a neo-Nazi podcaster and streamer …. His long march from the far-right fringe to conservative mainstream has been helped along by rising antisemitism, the movement’s increasingly-open embrace of gutter racism, and a cadre of zealous young followers whose political ideology was forged in white supremacist chat rooms (they call themselves ‘groypers’ after an alt-right meme). … Roberts attempted to thread a needle, claiming to oppose a nebulous notion of ‘cancellation’ while condemning some of Fuentes’[s] most over-the-top statements. But Fuentes’[s] open Nazism isn’t an ideological deviation.” (11/14/25)
“On one level, politics is about principles and values. At another level, it is about math. The Democrats angry about the compromise that resulted in the reopening of the federal government are confused about which level they are operating on. … Our constitutional system contains many chokepoints of different kinds — a feature, not a bug — and exploiting those is what you do, within reason, when the math is against you. Supermajority requirements empower legislative minorities, just as procedural mandates and the Bill of Rights protect minority interests outside of the legislative chamber. We do not follow strictly majoritarian conventions, nor should we: Majorities get things wrong — violently wrong, tragically wrong — all the time. That’s why the Founding Fathers so often used the word ‘democracy’ in a monitory fashion. But minority power is by nature largely obstructive in character.” (11/14/25)
“The world’s largest shopping event, Singles’ Day, was again held Nov. 11 in China – though the online bargains began weeks earlier, as is the case with Black Friday sales in other parts of the world. This year, however, the event was not just a commercial gala. China’s annual shopping spree, which began in 2009 in earnest, no longer focuses on singles. (The date 11.11 resembles ‘bare sticks’ in Chinese, an idiom for being unhitched.) The unofficial holiday of mass consumption is now a key economic indicator: Whether or not the world’s second-largest economy will fall into a downward spiral of falling prices, or deflation. Early reports from China’s giant e-commerce firms suggest spending for Singles’ Day was not enough to trigger a rise in retail prices and thus help end more than two years of declining prices.” (11/14/25)
Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by staff
“Implemented during the Biden administration, the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule was designed to help reduce conflict on federal lands and facilitate voluntary conservation. The rule identifies conservation as a valid ‘use’ of federal land under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA), puts conservation on an equal footing with other uses such as grazing and energy development, and — importantly — authorizes ‘conservation leases’ as a tool to support voluntary, private investment in restoring and stewarding public lands. While PERC does not support most aspects of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, we believe its conservation leasing provisions are worth keeping.” (11/14/25)
“Why did [Heritage Foundation president Kevin] Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned. Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA. Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time.” (11/14/25)
