Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

The FBI recently raided the home of a Secret Service agent on Vice President JD Vance’s detail in an alleged tax and wire fraud case involving millions of dollars in donations and grants.

In the alleged scheme, the agent accepted donations to a charity that purports to help inner-city youth and victims of domestic violence but didn’t provide the services it reported to the IRS, according to several knowledgeable sources in the Secret Service community.

The raid, which took place on or around Dec. 8, was the culmination of more than a year of work by a joint FBI-IRS investigation that the Secret Service joined in recent months, the sources said. Federal investigators have interviewed more than a dozen Secret Service agents, some of whom contributed to the nonprofit at the center of the probe, which is run by an agent on Vance’s detail.

The Secret Service has placed the agent on unpaid administrative leave and suspended his security clearance, signs that the agency considers the potential crimes and misconduct extremely serious, even though the individual has not been arrested, according to sources familiar with the matter.

RealClearPolitics has reached out to the USSS and has been told a statement is forthcoming.

The alleged fraud could further bruise the Secret Service, which is facing retention problems as it struggles to regain its once elite reputation after two Trump assassination attempts last year. In addition to potential criminal prosecution, the Secret Service agent could face internal insider threat allegations for demonstrating poor judgment and possible criminal intent.

“This is bigger than the 2012 prostitution scandal because agents are trained to investigate tax and bank wire fraud – anyone involved knew what they were doing was illegal,” one source remarked.

In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents and other personnel were placed on administrative leave, and several were eventually fired after their superiors discovered they had hired prostitutes during a trip to Colombia to prepare for then-President Obama’s visit to the Summit of the Americas.

The agent whose home was raided is listed as the founder and chairman of the charity’s board of directors on tax documents filed with the IRS.

The charity in question purports to provide laptops to young inner-city youth in its “Laptops for Hope Program” – at least some of which are laptops donated by the Secret Service because they are beyond their warranties, according to knowledgeable sources. Investigators, however, are looking into whether laptops discovered in the basement of the agent’s home were ever donated to the youth or whether there were plans to do so.  

In tax documents, the charity states that its mission is to provide “emergency assistance to survivors of domestic violence, financial literacy, preventing childhood obesity, & [stet] supporting families affected by HIV/AIDS in VA, MD, DC, & GA.”

The alleged tax and wire fraud schemes could implicate numerous Secret Service agents and employees, some of whom allegedly donated to the charity and then received part of their donation back in a payment. Investigators are looking into whether the donations allowed the Secret Service agents to file deductions and write off numerous work-related expenses, the sources said.

The charity has been operating since 2022, receiving $351,329 in contributions and grants in its first year while paying just $23,000 in salaries, tax documents show. In 2023, contributions and grants shot up to $806,409, and the nonprofit paid its officers a total of $154,590. Those numbers increased to $979,053 in contributions and grants in 2024, the latest tax document available. That year, the charity reported paying $267,221 in salaries.  

Yes, it’s been five years.

Yes, it’s the season of joy and forgiveness, blah blah blah.

But, fuck that!

In 2020, while the sheeple huddled in fear-porn isolation, a cabal of power-hungry bureaucrats and pharma-shilling “experts” pulled off the greatest heist in modern history: they stole Christmas.

Not with guns or tanks, but with “emergency decrees,” arbitrary lockdowns, and endless streams of hysterical propaganda about a virus with a 99.7% survival rate for most.

Across the West, authoritarian governors and health czars like California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo played Grinch-in-Chief.

Family gatherings? Banned.

Churches closed on the holiest night of the year, while big-box retailers like Walmart raked in billions—essential, you see.

Travel restrictions grounded flights, borders slammed shut, and millions faced solitary holidays, Zoom “celebrations” replacing real human connection.

In the UK, Boris Johnson’s last-minute Tier 4 lockdown crushed plans for millions, proving politicians love nothing more than moving goalposts.

And to ensure we don’t forget (or forgive) those that imposed such a farce upon so many, Martin Armstrong dug up some images as a reminder…

The economic carnage was deliberate: small businesses gutted, restaurants shuttered, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos laughed all the way to his yacht.

Fauci the Flip-Flopper pontificated from his ivory tower, warning against singing carols or hugging grandma, as if seasonal joy itself was a superspreader event.

This wasn’t public health – it was social engineering on steroids.

Fear was the weapon, compliance the goal.

The tyrants wrapped their theft in “science” bows, but the data later exposed the scam: excess deaths from despair, suicides, delayed treatments far outweighed their “saved” lives narrative.

Five years on, the damage lingers: fractured families, eroded trust, and a precedent for endless control.

Christmas 2020 wasn’t just stolen – it was sacrificed on the altar of technocratic tyranny.

Never forget: they hated the Whos down in Whoville, and they’ll do it again given half a chance.

Never Again!

Authored by David Jensen via Substack,

Dutch trading specialist Karel Mercx posted the following commentary where the opposite (multiply by -1) of the silver swap rate minus US interest rates can be used as a proxy for the implied silver lease rate to determine physical shortage in the London silver market.:

“The 1-year silver swap minus the US interest rate is now –7.18%.

That distortion explains why the silver rally is not over.

Only at the red line do supply and demand normalize.”

A further six days ago Mercx posted the following commentary:

“ The 1-year silver swap minus the US interest rate is now almost –7%! That distortion is the key reason the silver rally is not over.

That spread should be positive, since silver needed in one year comes with storage, insurance, and financing costs.

Extra explanation.

The silver swap rate is a crucial part of the global precious-metals trade. It exists because major players such as banks, producers, industrial users, and investors constantly exchange silver for dollars without physically moving metal from vault to vault. This mechanism keeps the London physical market tightly connected to the New York financial market.

But that system is now under strain. Physical silver today is almost 7% more expensive than silver for delivery one year from now. Swaps were designed to avoid shipping metal around the world, yet today silver is being moved because buyers are demanding delivery.

Holding physical silver isn’t easy or cheap.

A $1 million position weighs several hundred kilograms, spread across dozens of heavy bars that require vault space, insurance, and security…

…That question is now being priced in. As long as the 1-year silver swap minus US rates remains below the red line, silver’s upside pressure continues. No one knows where supply and demand will reconnect. … ”

I’ve added a trend arrow to the chart that Mercx posted:

Figure 1 – One Year Silver Swaps Minus One Year One Year US Interest Rates at Dec 23, 2025; source: Karel Mercx x.com

Note that the distance from the red line normalization is increasing as the London silver shortage intensifies. The London silver market is devolving, not stabilizing.

[ZH: the spread between SHFE and COMEX silver futures is extreme to say the least – incentivizing the flow from London to Shanghai]…

This is what a run on the London ‘physical’ silver market looks like where holders of unallocated promissory notes for silver ownership and delivery, at the margins, start to demand physical metal delivery.

The enormous leverage of London paper (vapor) claims vs physical silver available for delivery gives the potential for a very quick unwind of London.

On the holiest day of the Christian calendar, the nonprofit Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) purchased a gigantic Times Square advertisement in New York City declaring, “Jesus is Palestinian.” This inflammatory and divisive rhetoric is nothing more than an attempt by the Arab nonprofit to stir up the Christian nation with their own narrative.

Adeb Ayoub, National Executive Director of ADC, told The New York Post that the nonprofit has been renting ad space in Times Square this year, with rotating weekly messages.

“There’s a lot more similarities between Arabs and Muslims and Christians in this country than others want to allow us to believe and there are similarities and there is a fear of culture, shared religion,” Ayoub said.

NYPost’s report continued:

“Most of the Americans in this country are Christian and the birthplace of Christianity is Palestine. If people wanna go back and forth and debate it, then great, the billboard sparked debate. At least you’re having a conversation about it. Otherwise, we’re silenced and our voices and positions don’t come out.”

When asked whether his group is disputing that Jesus was Jewish, Ayoub said that “Jesus lives within all of us” and that the subject was “up for interpretation.”

He added that Jewish groups he claims have waged a digital war against him since the Spring are free to promote their own views about Jesus.

Based on publicly available records, Adeb Ayoub appears to be affiliated with the United Mission for Relief and Development (UMR), which has a significant focus on Palestine. He also has links to “Liberation Legal” … 

Earlier this year, ADC hosted ArabCon 2025, the nation’s largest annual convention of Arab Americans, in Deaborne, Michigan, which hosted anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour and China-linked Medea Benjamin of CodePink, among others.

Ahead of ArabCon, ADC wrote on their website, “Recent attempts to smear the organization and our upcoming conference deploy the same racist and tired playbook meant to intimidate and shame Arab and Muslim spaces– branding ArabCon with inflammatory labels like ‘pro‑terrorism’ and ‘antisemitic.'”

Ayoub told NYPost that a new billboard will appear in Times Square for New Year’s Eve… 

In a stunning development, the embattled Department of Justice chose Christmas Eve to announce it had discovered more than a million more documents with potential links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Already in violation of a legislatively-mandated Dec 19 deadline to release all such files — and facing demands for an audit of its handling of the process — the DOJ says the enormous new tranche of documents will require “weeks” of additional work before they can be posted.  

“We have lawyers working around the clock to review and make the legally required redactions to protect victims, and we will release the documents as soon as possible,” the DOJ said. “Due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks. The Department will continue to fully comply with federal law and President Trump’s direction to release the files.” The DOJ said the documents come from the Southern District of New York and the FBI. 

Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who’s been the Capitol Hill’s leading voice on Epstein-file declassification, indicated the staggering volume of newly-acknowledged documents gives new reason to question the lack of additional prosecutions beyond Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell:

Today the DOJ claims the Epstein-Maxwell file exceeds 1.7 million documents.

And they still expect you to believe this involves only two guilty people.

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) December 25, 2025

Employing more pointed rhetoric, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the Trump administration is “openly engaged in a cover-up protecting Epstein’s co-conspirators and the powerful men who abused women and girls.” 

Also on Christmas Eve — and before the million-document “discovery” was announced — a group of 12 senators sent a letter to DOJ Acting Inspector General Don Berthiaume demanding an audit of the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files. Beyond pointing to the failure to meet the Dec. 19 deadline, the senators said the huge number of redactions in the released documents have raised “serious questions as to whether the Department is properly applying the limited exceptions for redaction that are permitted under the Act. Any withholding or redaction beyond those specified circumstances is against the law.” Eleven of the 12 signatories were Democrats, with Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski the only Republican. 

On Sunday, Massie and California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna said they were in discussions with other members of Congress about potentially holding Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt — over the DOJ’s failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act enacted in November. “We only need the House for inherent contempt,” Khanna said on Meet the Press, “and we’re building a bipartisan coalition, and it would fine Pam Bondi for every day that she’s not releasing these documents.” 

Khanna also decried the volume of redactions in the files that have been released. “The redactions were excessive. And even Harvard Law professors who have looked at that have said, you can’t redact internal communications, you can’t redact workforce product, and the courts are going to find that these were excessive.” 

Are these the “narrowly tailored” and “segregable” redactions that the drafters of the “Epstein Files Transparency Act” had in mind? pic.twitter.com/z22j7GEcYt

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 20, 2025

Transparency advocates have been exasperated by the amount of content that’s been redacted — with hundreds and hundreds of pages completely blacked out. However, raising additional questions about the DOJ’s competence, some of the department’s black ink turned out to be see-through, as internet sleuths discovered some of the redacted Epstein files can be read by simply cutting and pasting blacked-out passages into a new document. While they first bloomed on social media, the easily-erasable DOJ redactions have been subsequently reported by The Guardian and New York Times. 

‼️🇺🇸: I can CONFIRM that the Epstein copy/paste hack does INDEED show redacted text from the DOJ Epstein Transparency Act Files

That said, We should do everything we can to not publish Epstein Survivors names.

I will be doing batch unredactioms tomorrow for us to go through. 🫡 pic.twitter.com/v6o929WcO5

— Diligent Denizen 🇺🇸 (@DiligentDenizen) December 24, 2025

It’s not clear how many documents have been incompetently redacted. While no bombshells have yet been uncovered, the un-redactions may be damning in a different kind of way, as they might demonstrate DOJ is failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s mandate for maximum disclosure, with redactions only allowed for a narrow set of exceptional circumstances.

For example, one of the documents that’s been cleansed of black-outs and posted to social media is an exhibit from a civil suit against two executors of Epstein’s estate — Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn. Two of the redacted passages read:  

“Between September 2015 and June 2019, Indyke signed (FAC) for over $400,000 made payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model who received over $380,000 through monthly payments of $8,333 made over a period of more than three and a half years until the middle of 2019.”  …

“Defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex trafficking and abuse, conduct by paying large sums of money to participant-witnesses, including by paying for their attorneys’ fees and case costs in litigation related to this conduct.”  

It’s not clear why these entire passages would be redacted. Even if there were reasons to hide Indyke’s name, it’s far from clear why the other allegations would be hidden from the public.  

While ZeroHedge readers may differ with Khanna on a long list of issues, he raised some important questions on Meet the Press: 

“I guess the question the American people have even to me, is, is the system so corrupt, is the system so corrupt that Thomas Massie and you defy the odds, pass a bill through a discharge petition, get the Senate, get the president to sign it, and still, these rich and powerful people are being protected. Who has this kind of hold on our government? What are they hiding? Why are they not releasing this?” 

On a lighter note, news that the DOJ is suddenly aware of more than a million additional Epstein documents gave social media users grist for some dark humor: 

We thank you for this holiday entertainment pic.twitter.com/heikBwJqR5

— Three Year Letterman (@3YearLetterman) December 24, 2025

The Epstein files redactions. pic.twitter.com/t8fT74SK1J

— Roddy 🇨🇦 (@RodKahx) December 23, 2025

Justice Dept. Says It Has Found Over a Million More Epstein Documents pic.twitter.com/ZPo2U8cgor

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) December 24, 2025

A common pattern across America’s far-left organizations is alarming behavior that appears militant, resembling revolutionary movements more than civic advocacy. There is a historical explanation that is rarely discussed: for decades, Cuban intelligence has penetrated and influenced segments of the radical left, enabling influence operations with nation-killing objectives.

This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it speculative. The pattern stretches back more than half a century and follows a consistent arc: student activism, escalation into disorder, foreign ideological grooming, and institutional capture through nonprofits that later rebrand as “civil society.”

The story begins in 1968, when members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), including Mark Rudd and Bernadine Dohrn, were invited to Cuba. That trip resulted in the founding of the Venceremos Brigade, which publicly framed itself as a solidarity delegation but privately represented something more consequential. Multiple intelligence assessments and contemporary reporting alleged that SDS radicals requested formal training from the Castro regime, including instruction in explosives and sabotage. The objective was explicit: to move from protest politics to revolutionary struggle with foreign backing.

Upon his return to the U.S., Rudd was elected president of Columbia University’s SDS chapter and quickly presided over a wave of sit-ins, building takeovers, and riots that paralyzed campus life and captured national attention. After his expulsion, Rudd, alongside Dohrn, went on to become co-founders of the Weather Underground, a domestic extremist organization responsible for bombings and violent underground activity throughout the early 1970s.

The lesson Cuba learned from this period was very simple: American radicals could be trained, networked, ideologically shaped, and then sent back to do their dirty work.

Last week, we were honored to send a delegation of 40 DSA elected leaders & rank-and-file members from chapters big & small across the country to #Cuba, where they delivered hundreds of pounds of solidarity aid & learned about the achievements & challenges of Cuban socialism. pic.twitter.com/SD1hul0PB7

— DSA (@DemSocialists) October 20, 2025

Guess where Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass got her start in politics…

Did You Know:

Karen Bass got her start in politics in the Venceremos Brigade, a Marxist front group in the US funded by Cuba

She traveled to Cuba many times

The Venceremos Brigade directly spawned domestic terror groups the Weather Underground and May 19th Org pic.twitter.com/Pno87kL50S

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) January 25, 2025

Here’s what happened in Los Angeles this summer…

Fast-forward to 2025, and the same structure still exists, but it has been supercharged with vastly greater assets and manpower, fueled by billionaire leftists who operate what is now widely described as the protest industrial complex. This network is increasingly described as a color-revolution-style operation led by NGOs to undermine the Trump administration and ‘America First.’ What were once underground protest movements now operate openly and, in some cases, violently, supported by armies of “movement lawyers,” expansive national coalitions, and dark-money-funded NGOs. There was even the political assassination of Charlie Kirk this fall, a reality that even Deep State media outlets like The Atlantic were forced to acknowledge…

According to a defected Cuban intelligence officer and corroborating intelligence reporting, legacy Castro-aligned groups such as the Venceremos Brigade and the National Lawyers Guild have been controlled by Cuba’s Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI) since at least the 1980s. That influence is exerted through ICAP (the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples).

ICAP is an official Cuban government organization, founded in 1960, that promotes international solidarity and cultural exchange. On paper, it organizes delegations, volunteer brigades, educational tours, and international conferences that oppose U.S. sanctions and support Cuba’s political system. It appears benign – almost quaint.

WATCH: Washington Post Reporter Says Democrats Won’t ‘Go Hard’ On Cuba Because They Agree With The Regime https://t.co/O8tP3Wb17a pic.twitter.com/tV2Uk9B9h3

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) July 19, 2021

But declassified CIA documents dating back to the Cold War describe a consistent operational method: foreign recruits were brought to Cuba for training in intelligence tradecraft or guerrilla sabotage and were received by DGI officers posing as ICAP officials. ICAP functioned as the intake valve – political cover for intelligence operations designed to cultivate long-term assets rather than short-term spies.

What exists today is not a single organization but a complex ecosystem.

ICAP sits at the center, functioning as a coordinating hub. Orbiting it is the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a deliberately loose coalition that links 77 organizations of activists, nonprofits, and campaigns while minimizing legal exposure or clear command structures. The National Lawyers Guild serves as the lawfare and agitation arm, training protesters, facilitating delegations, and litigating against U.S. institutions under the guise of civil rights.

Funding and infrastructure come from the Neville Roy Singham Network, a web of organizations tied to Chinese Communist Party-aligned capital that provides money, logistics, and professionalized organizing capacity. Public narratives are amplified by legacy anti-war organizations like CODEPINK and the ANSWER Coalition, which are also now under the Singham umbrella. They frame U.S. foreign policy as illegitimate while defending authoritarian adversaries. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) functions as the political activation channel, translating activist energy into electoral and legislative influence on behalf of the Cuban regime.

Viewed individually, each organization insists it is merely engaging in advocacy. Viewed together, the pattern is unmistakable.

Examine the leadership and membership of the National Network on Cuba and the picture sharpens further. Calla Walsh, founder of PalAction U.S. and Unity of Fields, served as a co-chair of NNOC. Manolo De Los Santos lived in Cuba for six years and maintains relationships with senior ICAP officials and Cuban political leadership. Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK lived in Cuba for five years, married a Cuban communist, and went on to build organizations centered around Cuba delegations. Groups as radical as Armed Queers of Salt Lake City appear inside NNOC membership rolls. The DSA has held meetings at the Cuban Embassy in New York City and subsequently traveled to Cuba, where it announced a formal partnership with ICAP.

🇨🇺 🇨🇳 These Cuba trips are run through ICAP, a shadowy Cuban intel front, and the Venceremos Brigade. Since 1970, at least 744 delegations have brought U.S. activists to Havana for a crash course in communist collaboration. Cuba used to be a proxy for the Soviets but lately it’s… pic.twitter.com/n4QePQ99UE

— Peter Schweizer (@peterschweizer) September 16, 2025

None of this proves espionage in the cinematic sense. It does not need to.

🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING 2: The 2025 May Day trip of SLC Armed Queers to Cuba: “Well, if we’re terrorists, we’re proud to be terrorists”

I’ve obtained a now-deleted video.

In it, Ermiya Fanaeian and an unidentified man named Connor talk openly about:

👉 Palestinian students at… pic.twitter.com/CBkStDYjEO

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) September 16, 2025

Come on now…

So here is @senwarren with the head of the Salt Lake City Armed Queers (she/her). Let’s see what a few hours of tracing lobby fund flows will reveal next. https://t.co/8TaLE0e4QA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2025

Influence operations are not about secrets; they are about shaping norms, training protest foot soldiers, and aligning political instincts. By that measure, Cuba’s intelligence services have been extraordinarily successful. Entire segments of the U.S. radical nonprofit sphere now reflexively defend foreign authoritarian regimes and justify violence, while dehumanizing and demonizing half the country by calling them “Nazis” and “fascists.”

Here is the roadmap to Charlie Kirk’s assassination… pic.twitter.com/S4JPbPiFy8

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) September 12, 2025

The reason target profiling of Republicans was done by the radical left and Democrats is very simple:

• “Planning War Against Fascists” – Socialist Rifle Association Boasts 10,000 Members

Many of these organizations are conspicuously opposed to anything associated with America First, with some openly calling for the destruction of Western capitalism and even the end of the U.S. Strikingly, they all sing from the same radical Marxist songbook.

If you want to understand why the radical left appears to hate America and seeks to implode the nation from within, it is not difficult to see that these ideas are rarely developed organically. More often, they are shaped and reinforced by outside influences. This chart helps explain why the radical left has become so radical.

As per The Washington Times, “Cuba’s intelligence apparatus is training foreign nationals to wage war against the West.”

It’s already begun:

• US Gov’t Foils Terror Plot By Far-Left Group Plotting New Year’s Eve Bomb Attack

The Atlantic is absolutely correct: “Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise.” And perhaps we just unveiled why… 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“And may all your Christmases be [woke].”

As Santa prepares for his harrowing journey around the world, he is being closely pursued by liberal commentators protesting his race, gender, and capitalist leanings.

The perpetually outraged have finally come for Christmas.

One columnist at Slate called for Santa to be replaced by a penguin due to his race.

Aisha Harris admitted that she was being a bit cheeky in pushing the penguin substitute but sought to express “my real concern that America continues to promote the harmful idea of whiteness-as-default.”

Back to Santa. The British Brighton and Hove Museums have been the focus of this debate over the reposting of an earlier column by the museum’s Joint Head of Culture Change, Simone LaCorbinière, who explained that the traditional Christmas simply will not do with a Santa who is “too white, male” and a colonizer of elves.

I suppose that when you use public dollars to hire someone who will serve as “Joint Head of Culture Change,” it was only a matter of time before they came for Christmas. After all, the idea is that the British culture must generally change, right?

In a 2023 column titled Decolonising Father Christmas, LaCorbinière warns that Santa is “too white, male” and the traditional story “presents Santa as the ultimate authority of all societies. This asks us to accept colonial assumptions of cultural superiority. It doesn’t recognise the complex realities colonised people face.”

She expresses horror at the fact that Santa is “an old white man [who] supervise[s] the elves’ work.” We can put aside that Santa was identified in “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823) as a  “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.” LaCorbinière portrays him as a heartless white capitalist living off the labor of a captive elf workforce. She calls for “Santa to work in the factory alongside the elves.”

Changes must be made, according to the museum, to decolonize Christmas and break away from holiday images that are “white, male and non-disabled”:

“This perpetuates the harmful ‘colonial gaze’. Non-Western cultures are ‘othered’. It says that the coloniser has the power to judge all people. And it ignores many communities’ histories and traditions. Telling the story like this teaches new generations that the coloniser knows best.”

Santa is not alone.

In the meantime, NPR noted White Christmas has racist undertones, while Joy Reid has declared Jingle Bells to be a racist song.

Even “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a “bigoted” story fed to the populace to reinforce capitalist and racist values. Professor James Deaville warned recently that “while some viewers see the ending as affirming community, the film also keeps George partly ignorant of how the forces of inequity are actually operating in his largely white community.”

They are the self-flagellants of the holidays, moving through Christmas markets (which are also fascist traditions) with Gregorian chants of guilt.   Here are some enlightened carolers seen recently spreading “Tidings of Great Joy [Reid]” for the holiday:

Clearly there are many liberals who still enjoy the holidays without the need for self-affirming declarations of outrage or disgust. 

However, for some on the left, there is little joy in Christmas without identity politics and white guilt.

So the more the merrier and, as Tiny Tim declared, “God bless us, every one!”

The Trump administration has ordered the U.S. military to enforce a two-month “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil, signaling an intensification of gunboat diplomacy aimed at fostering regime instability in Caracas, with potential spillover effects that could ripple across the Caribbean into Cuba.

“While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for),” a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday afternoon, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. Coast Guard has already intercepted two Venezuelan crude tankers this month and is prepared to seize another dark fleet tanker, but the vessel Bella-1 was chased away.

Sources familiar with the sanctioned Bella-1 told Bloomberg that the tanker retreated into the Atlantic after being pursued by U.S. Coast Guard forces. The tanker failed to comply with instructions to move to calmer waters for boarding.

Bella-1’s decision to evade closely monitored Venezuelan waters underscores how the Trump administration’s U.S. blockade, widely viewed as gunboat diplomacy, has already disrupted Venezuela–Cuba–China oil flows. The blockade is set to further tighten financial pressure on President Nicolás Maduro’s government by constraining crucial oil revenues. Beijing has already condemned Trump’s gunboat diplomacy.  

According to analytics firm Kpler, Caracas has shipped nearly 900,000 barrels per day this year and relies on 400 dark-fleet tankers to transport the crude, much of which is bound for China. 

“The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on Maduro, and the belief is that by late January, Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the U.S,” the U.S. official told Reuters.

Also reported this week, the Trump administration continues to expand its large military presence in the Caribbean, with more than 15,000 troops, an aircraft carrier, multiple warships, and stealth fighters staged across the region.

As we have repeatedly noted, this all reflects a significant reposturing of the U.S. military toward so-called Western hemispheric defense, effectively a Monroe Doctrine 2.0.

A Tuesday UN Security Council session quickly grew tense and members squared off over what’s happening off the coast of Venezuela, scene of apparent preparations for some kind of US military action.

Russia and China issued common condemnation of Washington, blasting a campaign of intimidation against Caracas which goes against the principles of the United Nations, and is based on “cowboy behavior”.

The emergency session of the UNSC was formally requested by Venezuela and immediately backed by China and Russia.

Additionally the Chinese side complained that the US is currently “infringing upon other countries’ sovereignty, security, and legitimate rights and interests, seriously violate the UN Charter and international law, and threaten peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro initially submitted a formal appeal to all 193 UN member states and Caribbean leaders, calling out the US “escalation of extremely serious aggression” and urging the UN to act.

The the American side wasn’t having it, with US Ambassador Mike Waltz responding by saying, “The United States will do everything in its power to protect our hemisphere, our borders, and the American people.”

“Maduro’s ability to ‌sell Venezuela’s oil enables his fraudulent claim to power and ‍his narco-terrorist ‍activities,” Waltz said before the 15-member council. “The people of Venezuela, ⁠frankly, ‌deserve better.”

The US administration’s rhetoric has grown increasingly in favor of admitting the end goal is regime change, also connected with Trump’s earlier declaration of “total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil vessels sailing to and from Venezuela. 

The American President has insisted that Maduro is using oil money to finance “drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping” and so it would be “smart” for him to step down.

🇻🇪🇺🇸 FROM ROBOT DANCE TO OIL CRACKDOWN: MADURO’S SHOW MEETS U.S. PRESSURE

Maduro just had a dance-off with a humanoid robot at a tech fair in Venezuela.

Yep, the president of a country where many people still can’t afford basic food is out here vibing with a machine.

It… pic.twitter.com/eVrIrUaeFU

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) December 24, 2025

American military assets, including special forces, are at the moment in a ‘holding pattern’ awaiting potential orders from the Commander-in-Chief, in a build-up which has been happening for a long time.