“On the night Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election, he delivered a rousing victory speech that made explicit the connection between his economic agenda and the national fight against authoritarianism. Calling out President Donald Trump, Mamdani declared, ‘If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.’ Several weeks later — after that despot had threatened to besiege New York City with immigration raids and strip its federal funding, should Mamdani win—the mayor-elect stood beside Trump during a surreal White House press briefing. When a reporter pressed Mamdani on whether he still considered the president a fascist, the jovial, clearly charmed Trump interjected, ’You can just say yes. … It’s easier than explaining it’. The response was disarmingly nonchalant, coming from the head of an administration that has gone to great lengths to crush opposition to fascism elsewhere.” (12/22/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Richard M Ebeling
“President Trump and the current Federal Reserve Board of Governors differ as to what interest-rate changes should be focusing on and how the accompanying monetary changes should be applied to facilitate the achievement of the chosen shorter- or longer-term targets. But what is missed in most of the discussions, debates, and rhetorical exchanges is that both share a common institutional and policy premise: a government agency having the capacity to undertake monetary central planning.” (12/22/25)
“Since the federal government entered the highway business early last century, it has largely paid for roads by taxing gasoline purchases. The federal gas tax accounts for roughly 70 percent of Highway Trust Fund revenue, and every state has its own gas tax as well. But today people don’t buy as much gas, and these funds face shortfalls. According to the Pew Research Center, the collective road maintenance backlog of 24 states has grown to over $86 billion since 2015. The tax was never a particularly good way to fund roads, and new solutions are overdue. Fortunately, there may be an opportunity to take advantage of skyrocketing demand for warehouses and data centers to help pay for roads, by selling state and federal land near highways.” (12/21/25)
“On December 17, surrounded by festive holiday decorations, US president Donald Trump delivered an upbeat — one might even say manic — address to the nation …. While many expected something weighty (perhaps announcement of further military escalation versus Venezuela), what they got was laundry list of Trump’s ‘accomplishments’ since his inauguration in January. Most of those ‘accomplishments’ — ruinous tariffs on American consumers, immoral and economically damaging immigration raids, etc. — were things we already knew about from watching our bank balances draw inexorably down. One, however, stood out to me as the most risible. ‘For the first time in 3,000 years,’ Trump said, he’s brought ‘peace to the Middle East.’ He said that, with as close to a straight face as he ever shows, hours after saluting the flag-draped caskets of two US National Guard members and a civilian interpreter killed in Syria the previous week.” (12/20/25)
“Cicero offered a useful piece of advice: Esse quam videri — ‘be rather than seem,’ that the important thing is to be virtuous or good or successful or courageous rather than merely to appear to be. Trump has spent his life turning that on its head: He was a middling businessman who was in bankruptcy court a lot more often than he was at the top of the game, so he spent years playing a successful businessman on television. He cannot write an ordinary good English sentence, but he paid someone to write a book and put his name on it. His imaginary friend John Barron would call writers at the New York Post and other outlets to tell them silly lies about everything from Trump’s business successes to his dating life. And, of course, he emblazons his name on things — most recently, the Kennedy Center.” (12/19/25)
“It seems strange thinking about Kill Bill in 2025 the way people did about Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather in 2003, but they just don’t make movies like that anymore and it’s hard to imagine something like Kill Bill getting made in recent years by anyone other than someone with Tarantino’s clout. … Unlike films released between 2016-2024, Kill Bill never felt beholden to some woke Hays Code requiring films to conform to the delicate sensibilities of a thirty-five-year old cat mom with a grievance studies degree.” (12/20/25)
“Over the past year, a new ideological framework, which I’ll call neo-decolonialism, has been taking hold in activist, academic, and political discourse. This framework has the potential to reopen and reinflame a vast number of conflicts. This is where slogans like ‘globalise the intifada’ ultimately lead — to a world in which no political settlement is ever final, and no peace is durable. It’s important to make a clear distinction between actual decolonisation and what I am calling neo-decolonialism. Real decolonisation was a concrete, historically specific process in which empires withdrew from territories they had been administering, as exemplified by the end of the Raj. … neo-decolonialism is not about dismantling real empires …. Instead, it retroactively reclassifies political arrangements as ‘colonial’ based on contemporary group dynamics, racial or ethnic categories (e.g. ‘whiteness’), and the question of which side has the most power.” (12/20/25)
“The amazing thing about Hanukkah is that despite the past mistakes and the mess the ancient Israelis got themselves into, there were a few (indeed a remnant of a remnant: the proverbial three percent, perhaps) who were able to figure out and take successful action to recover and preserve their nation, their people, their religion, and their culture. And thereby set the stage for the rest of human history to our day. Even though those same Maccabean rebels turned around and did exactly the same things that had led to the mess they got out of. And indeed, started making the same mistakes that their oppressors, the Selucids, had made in abusing the Jews.” (12/20/25)
“Few believe the justifications for the ongoing US murder campaign, and now military blockade, off the coast of Venezuela. Even US officials seem halfheartedly committed to their claims about stopping drugs. They now concede that the real goal is overthrowing the Venezuelan government and recovering ‘our oil,’ which was mistakenly buried under Venezuelan soil. If they succeed there, they will surely escalate violence against Cuba and perhaps other noncompliant governments. The larger goal, proclaims the US secretary of defense, is the ‘restoration of our power and prerogatives in this hemisphere.’ That entails reasserting ‘US military dominance in the Western Hemisphere’ and with it the ‘access to key terrain throughout the region’ — that is, markets and resources like our oil. In the meantime, if blowing up boats can also divert attention from domestic scandals, that’s a bonus.” (12/20/25)
“Federal regulators have created a trucking crisis — and they did it by ignoring their own evidence, bypassing basic safeguards and targeting a workforce that has kept America moving through every national emergency of the past decade. In September, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued an interim final rule that effectively bars most lawfully present, work-authorized immigrant drivers from obtaining, renewing or maintaining non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses. The rule limits eligibility to just three visa categories — H-2A, H-2B and E-2 — while excluding refugees, asylees, DACA recipients and other federally authorized workers who have long been able to drive using a valid employment authorization document. These drivers meet every federal safety requirement, pass the same tests, satisfy the same medical standards and comply with the same drug-and-alcohol protocols as every other CDL holder. Yet FMCSA is treating immigration category as a disqualifying risk.” (12/20/25)
