Source: Brownstone Institute
by Daniel Nuccio

“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)

https://brownstone.org/articles/at-the-movies-but-for-how-long/

Source: Quillette
by John Aziz

“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)

https://quillette.com/2025/12/20/the-infinite-reopening-of-history-activism-decolonisation/

Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton

“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)

https://thepriceofliberty.org/2025/12/20/the-real-reason-to-commemorate-hanukkah/

Source: Common Dreams
by Kevin Young

“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)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/strategy-stop-venezuela-war

Source: The Hill
by Bhupinder Kaur

“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)

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/5656703-fmcsa-rule-immigrant-truckers/