“There is no ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, even though an agreement reached on October 9 supposedly established one. The Israeli assault on the Strip continues, albeit at a reduced pace from what it was for most of the past two years. By one count, Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement 591 times between October 10 and December 2 with a combination of air and artillery attacks and direct shootings. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that during this period, 347 Palestinians have been killed and 889 injured. The pattern of casualties including women and children as well as journalists continues. Meanwhile, it is hard to find any documented Israeli casualties in the Gaza Strip during the same period, beyond an early shooting incident at Rafah in which Israel says a soldier was killed and Hamas says it had nothing to do with it.” (12/05/25)
“Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement — in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged. I no longer look at it that way. … taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly — one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.” (12/05/25)
“Although much has already been said, I can’t not comment on Sarah Hurwitz, the former Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter, who faults young people (especially young Jews) for applying their power of abstraction in thinking about the Holocaust. What do I mean by that? Hurwitz thinks (or says she does) that the TikTok generation makes a big mistake by drawing general lessons from the National Socialist regime’s mass murder of European Jews last century. She is dismayed that young people have concluded that powerful bad people, no matter who they are, should not harm weak people, no matter who they are. So what’s the problem? According to Hurwitz, they were supposed to learn that killing weak people of a particular ethnicity or religion is horrible only when the victims are Jewish.” (12/05/25)
“Some of the damage done by ‘campaign finance reforms’ has been reversed. And Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that likely will continue the court’s dismantling of measures the political class has enacted to control political speech about itself. This case can extinguish an absurdity: a campaign regulation supposedly intended to prevent parties from corrupting their own candidates. The multiplication of, and subsequent unraveling of, reformers’ laws to ration political speech is a decades-long lesson about cynicism in the guise of idealism.” (12/05/25)
“Americans, the Associated Press reports, spent a record $11.8 billion online on ‘Black Friday’ (the day after Thanksgiving) this year … and another record, $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving itself. Physical in-store traffic for Black Friday also ticked up versus the previous week, although shopping for deals has strongly moved online in recent years. What caught my eye about the story, though, was the headline, which suggests the record sales occurred ‘despite wider economic uncertainty.’ ‘Despite?’ More likely, in my opinion, ‘because.’ With inflation still running at about 3% annually, prices subject to Donald Trump’s seemingly random tariff policies, the job situation looking more uncertain and unpredictable than it has since the COVID-19 panic, etc., what have American consumers been up to? I can tell you what they’ve been up to, because I’ve been up to it myself. What we’ve all been up to is ‘waiting for the best deal if the purchase isn’t an emergency.'” (12/04/25)
Source: CounterPunch
by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead
“Every military servicemember’s oath is a pledge to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is not an oath to a politician. It is not an oath to a party. And it is not an oath to the police state. Yet what happens when those same men and women are being told—by their own government—that obedience to power and loyalty to a political leader come before allegiance to the Constitution they swore to uphold? That question isn’t hypothetical. It is the moral line now being tested in real time, and it goes to the heart of what kind of country we are: do we live in a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law, or in a militarized police state where ‘legality’ is whatever the person with the most power and the biggest army say it is?” (12/04/25)
“Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass. Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.” (12/04/25)
“The populist poles of the left and right are now linked in what political scientists call the ‘horseshoe.’ As each gets further from the center, it bends closer toward its counterpart on the other side. Both distrust markets, both want to micromanage industry, both are protectionist, both romanticize manufacturing work and resent the disruptions that come from open global competition. Both, in other words, are hostile to the core tenets of the liberal economic order that made America prosperous. Each side blames a different villain. For the left, it’s corporations and rich people; for the right, it’s immigrants and trade. But both sides insist that a brighter future is possible only through top-down political control, and neither wants to confront the real risk: a government already too large, spending money it doesn’t have and drifting toward fiscal crisis.” (12/04/25)
“Voting and making government more efficient only evolve tyranny to become more successful, giving false hope, making government easier to bear on the people, while tightening the chains. The Daughters of Liberty didn’t beg Parliament for lower taxes — they built parallel supply chains. Agorists do the same today: Monero instead of fiat, 3D-printed receivers instead of Form 4473s, mutual-aid networks instead of FEMA handouts, home churches and private schools instead of licensed 501(c)(3) compliance. Agorism is far from nihilism — it’s the proactive blueprint for a brighter future, harnessing innovations like cryptocurrencies for untaxed trade, 3D printing for self-reliant manufacturing, and sustainable agricultural techniques such as Walipini underground greenhouses to foster independence, (all year round greenhouses). Voting, on the other hand, veers closer to nihilism: people shrug, pick between two rotten options, and claim it’s the only path, all while surrendering to the system’s slow decay.” (12/04/25)
“There’s this thing in politics where people scramble to find something ‘good’ to talk about for their side, no matter how bad reality happens to be. It’s like someone being blown up in a terrorist attack, but their pants were not stained or torn at all – whew! It’s a special kind of ‘missing the forest for the trees’ you can only find in politics and dysfunctional relationships. Under the banner of ‘Tennessee Election Result Is a Fire Alarm for Republicans’, the editors at Newsweek have declared the results of a special election in December of an off-year to be something Republicans need to set their hair on fire over. Why? Because the Republican only won by 9 points in a district that Donald Trump carried by 22.” (12/04/25)
