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.

Authored by Vincent Cook via The Mises Institute,

When I was a junior at a high school in the suburbs of Los Angeles in late 1978, rather uncharacteristically, I took a big risk. The teacher of my American Government class, Mr. Knapp, gave us an assignment to write a serious paper about government economic policy. Instead of doing that, I decided to submit a paper with a satirical theme, estimating what it would cost to become Santa Claus. Not only was I not following instructions, I had no idea how Mr. Knapp would react to my brand of humor.

As you read the transcription of my paper below, bear in mind that I wrote it a few years before I learned anything about libertarianism or about Austrian economics. Still, I was under the influence of the libertarian zeitgeist prevailing in California at the time. With inflation raging out of control while traditional statist authority figures in both major parties were lamely touting yet more business-as-usual interventions and tax increases, Californians had had enough by then. In November of 1978, they revolted against property taxes (led by the legendary anti-tax gadfly Howard Jarvis, passing the Proposition 13 voter initiative to amend the state constitution) and even gave a libertarian candidate for governor 5.5 percent of the vote. Reading this work of mine, I’m sure you’ll agree that there was a definite proto-Austro-libertarian influence at work.

Keep in mind too that the purchasing power of the dollar in 1978 was at least a factor of ten times greater than it is today, and, of course, the American population has increased a great deal too, so you might find my cost estimates absurdly low. They weren’t low at the time, however. Also be mindful that there was neither an internet nor privacy-unfriendly smart phone service, and personal computers had only just been introduced into the marketplace (in fact, my part-time retail job responsibilities at Radio Shack the previous summer included sales of the primitive TRS-80 computer), so you’ll have to pardon the technological backwardness of my cost analysis in the information category—that part of Santa’s job could probably be done much more cheaply these days.

I have added screenshots of my paper showing a couple of Mr. Knapp’s comments.

Figure 1: Important Question Posed by Mr. Knapp

Source: Vincent Cook

Figure 2: Mr. Knapp’s Overall Comment

I’m taking another big risk to spring my youthful joke on you nearly five decades later, hoping that you’ll enjoy it as much as Mr. Knapp did back then—Merry Christmas!

Economics of Santa Claus

How often have you heard that there is no Santa Claus? If you check your history books, there was a real St. Nicholas who gave gifts to children, and he was given the Santa Claus title. Suppose someone wanted to claim this title now. How much would it cost? (I will restrict this Santa to the United States.)

To examine this profound question, I will break down the cost analysis into the three major categories which Santa is expected to fulfill.

1) Manufacture of 220 million gifts. These must be elf-handcrafted, at a factory at the North Pole.

2) Distribution of 220 million gifts. Local distribution takes place during about 5 hours on Christmas Eve by assistant Santa’s with 12 reindeer sleighs.

3) Monitoring of 220 million people, to determine how good they are.

For the first category, I will assume that an elf is a special sub-culture of human beings.

An elf should be able to turn out one hand-crafted gift a day. Since working conditions at the pole are very difficult, Santa will be expected to provide room and board, plus a salary of $200 per day. 220 million gifts then would require 220 million elf-days of labor at $200 per elf-day, at a total cost of $44 billion. Assuming continuous use of facilities, a city would be needed to house 600,000 elves. At the North Pole, this would be very expensive, say $1,000 per elf per day. This would bring the cost of facilities to $219 billion per year. Assuming the materials for each gift cost an average of $30, including transport to the pole, then the materials cost would be roughly $7 billion. Finally, we have the cost of the factories themselves; which, given the transient nature of the arctic ice cap, might cost $60 billion per year.

We see that arctic manufacturing is very expensive, I estimate the sub-total for this category to be $330 billion each year.

The second category is distribution.

This can be further divided into primary distribution (from North Pole to local distribution centers) and Christmas Eve local distribution (from local centers by sleigh to living rooms of families).

For the primary distribution, airlifting goods from the North Pole to the Canadian railroad network would be needed. This would probably cost about $10 billion. Further distribution and storage would also cost about $10 billion.

For Christmas Eve, assuming a sleigh crew of 3 men could handle 20 households, a fleet of 3 million sleighs, 36 million reindeer, and 90 million man-hours of labor would be needed. Assuming $500 a year for maintenance, the sleigh fleet would need $1.5 billion, plus another $0.5 billion for storage. Each reindeer would probably cost $1000 a year, for a total of $36 billion. 90 million man-hours, at $10 per man-hour, would cost about $1 billion. An additional $1 billion would be needed to cover the cost of legal expenses involved for employees caught trespassing while delivering gifts.

The sub-total for this category is about $60 billion.

The third category of Santa’s activities is in checking up on people to see who is good and who isn’t, to determine who deserves the best gifts.

The best method would be to hire a detective to monitor listening equipment at homes, workplaces, and schools. A single Santa detective could probably monitor 20 people, and write in-depth evaluations of them. For the United States, this would require 11 million detectives, plus a communications network, information storage and processing at the north pole, and equipment for the detectives. Since a full-time detective probably would cost $20,000 per year, total labor cost would be about $220 billion per year. Information evaluation, storage, and communications might cost $30 billion for 220 million reports. New equipment costs (such as “bugs,” mini microphones, transmitters, tape recorders, etc.) might run about $2 billion a year.

Sub-total for this category might be about $252 billion per year.

Adding up the three subtotals, we get a grand total for being a Santa Claus as $642 billion per year.

This is even more than the federal government spends, which shows how impractical it is to become a Santa Claus.

Still, there might be some potential income for Santa.

Huge sums of money could be extorted from people by the bad information that Santa’s detectives get.

Santa might also get to claim his 600,000 elves as dependents on his tax forms. His detectives could claim to be unemployed, and thus collect welfare and unemployment checks from the government. Santa could incorporate and collect royalties on the use of his image from corporations.

Best of all, Santa’s free gifts might drive corporations into bankruptcy, and he could take over all economic activity in the United States, with all of its potential for profit.

Santa could then proceed to take over the economies of many extremely rich nations, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and thus assure himself of enough money to run his operations.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist

Every Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of a child born into oppression—an occupied land, a climate of political fear, and a government quick to crush anything that threatened its authority.

Two thousand years later, the parallels are unmistakable.

If Jesus were born in modern America, under a government obsessed with surveillance, crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, religious nationalism, and absolute obedience to a head-of-state rather than the rule of law, would he survive long enough to preach about love, forgiveness and salvation? Would his message of peace, mercy, and resistance to empire be branded as extremism?

As familiar as the Christmas story of the baby born in a manger might be, it is also a cautionary tale for our age.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?

A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our  modern age?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Their lives make clear that the question “What would Jesus do?” is never abstract. It is always political, always dangerous, and always costly.

Even now, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state.

Jesus was not born into comfort or security. He was born poor, without shelter, in an occupied land ruled by force and fear, under the watchful eye of a government obsessed with control, compliance, and the elimination of perceived threats. His parents were politically powerless. His birthplace was makeshift. His earliest days were shaped by fear of state violence.

Herod’s response to the news of the Messiah’s birth was not humility or reflection, but paranoia. Threatened by the mere possibility of a rival authority, Herod turned to brute force. The lesson is timeless: this is how tyranny operates. Unchecked power, when gripped by insecurity, will always seek to eliminate dissent rather than allow its own corruption to be confronted.

Modern governments, including our own, cloaked in the language of security and “law and order,” behave no differently. Any challenge to centralized power is treated as a threat to be neutralized. In such an environment, speaking truth to power is dangerous. Challenging imperial authority invites retaliation.

From the moment of his birth, Jesus represented a threat—not because he wielded violence or political power, but because his life and message exposed the moral bankruptcy of empire and offered an alternative rooted in justice, mercy, and truth.

When Jesus grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say—things that would change how we view people, things that challenged everything empire stood for. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the American police state, his parents would not have traveled to Bethlehem for a census. Instead, they would have been entered into a vast web of government databases—flagged, categorized, scored, and assessed by algorithms they could neither see nor challenge. What passes for a census today is no longer a simple headcount, but rather part of a data-harvesting regime that feeds artificial intelligence systems, predictive policing programs, immigration enforcement, and national security watchlists.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and their newborn child might have been swept up in an early-morning ICE raid, detained without meaningful due process, processed through a profit-driven, private prison, and deported in the dead of night to a detention camp in a third-world country.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little—if anything—about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Jesus’ teachings—his refusal to pledge allegiance to empire, his warnings about wealth and power, his insistence that obedience to God sometimes requires resistance to unjust authority—would almost certainly be interpreted today as signs of ideological extremism. In an age when dissent is increasingly framed as a threat to public order, Jesus would not need to commit violence to be labeled dangerous. His words alone would suffice.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his forty days in the wilderness, his visions, or his confrontations with evil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and subjected to an involuntary psychiatric hold—detained not for what he had done, but for what authorities feared he might do. Increasingly, expressions of distress, spiritual conviction, or nonconformity are pathologized and treated as grounds for confinement, especially when paired with homelessness or poverty.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, whether Jesus had been born in his own time or in ours, the outcome would likely be the same. A government that demands obedience over conscience, order over mercy, and power over truth will always view a figure like Jesus as a threat.

The uncomfortable truth is that a nation willing to surveil, detain, and silence Jesus today is a nation far removed from the Gospel it claims to honor.

Christmas, then, is not merely a celebration of the Christ child’s birth. It is a recognition of all that follows it: what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.

That contradiction forces a reckoning.

The work of peace, justice, and compassion does not begin in the manger and end with a holiday, but demands courage long after the carols fade.

This reality stands in stark contrast to the brand of Christianity increasingly embraced and promoted by the government and its enforcers. A faith fused with nationalism, militarism, and obedience to authority bears little resemblance to the teachings of Christ.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is that this distortion of Christianity is no longer marginal—it is increasingly mainstream.

In too many cases, the modern church has not merely failed to challenge the machinery of empire—it has baptized it. When religious leaders bless endless wars, celebrate militarism, and portray violence as divinely sanctioned, they invert the Gospel itself.

Yet Jesus did not preach dominance, conquest, or submission to empire. He stood with the poor, the imprisoned, and the outcast—and he paid for it with his life.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we must decide, once again, whether we will march in lockstep with the machinery of a military empire—or with the child born under its shadow who dared to resist it.

The plot has thickened, becoming even more alarming and stranger, connected to a top Russian commander’s assassination in Moscow. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov was killed in a car bombing on Monday. But on Wednesday, there’s been yet another bomb blast under mysterious circumstances, with Russian authorities confirming the deaths of three more people, including two police officers. The whole thing happened close to the location where the Russian general was killed early in the week.

According to scant details issued by officials, two traffic police officers began investigating a “suspicious individual” near a police car on the city’s Yeletskaya Street. The officers approached the suspect, intending to detain him, but when they got close an explosive device was detonated.

There hasn’t been much in the way of official statements on the nature or motive of the attack issued from the Kremlin, but Russia’s Investigate Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement on Telegram a formal criminal case has been opened “regarding an attempt on the lives of traffic police officers”.

BBC in its reporting has pointed to a likely anti-Kremlin act of terrorism and sabotage:

Sources in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, told the BBC that a local resident, eliminated two representatives of the Russian law enforcement agency, “as a sign of disagreement with the Kremlin’s aggressive policy” and said that a man “threw an explosive package through the car window, causing an explosion”.

According to the HUR sources, two other people were taken to hospital with serious injuries.

Ukrainian military sources also told the BBC on Wednesday that the two officers killed had “participated in hostilities against Ukraine,” and added there was “evidence of their involvement in the torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war”.

If this account is accurate, this may have been yet another Ukraine-linked assassination targeting Russian personnel.

The Guardian also suggests this scenario: 

Russian Telegram channels close to the security services said the third person who died was believed to have been planting the explosive device.

An anonymous official from Ukraine’s military intelligence, known as the GUR, told the Associated Press the attack had been carried out as part of an agency operation.

Throughout the course of the war there’s been a string of high profile assassinations on Russian soil involving car and even cafe bombs. Attacks on local police officers have not been part of this, apparently until now.

A car carrying police officers was blown up in Moscow, according to Russian media outlets. 🔥🔥🔥

Some groups report that this occurred on the same street where, a few days earlier, the car of Russian Director General Fanil Sarvarov was bombed. pic.twitter.com/D4qGUHubIw

— Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 (@jurgen_nauditt) December 24, 2025

This adds to a growing list of high profile assassinations related to the Ukraine war. To review:

—Darya Dugina was killed in a car bombing in 2022 which was likely meant for her father, prominent political thinker and often dubbed “Putin ally” Aleksandr Dugin.

—Gen Igor Kirillov died in December 2024 outside of his residence when a bomb planted in a nearby scooter detonated.

—Gen Yaroslav Moskalik, who served as deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed in a car bomb attack last April. A “homemade” explosive device detonated under his Volkswagen Golf in a residential neighborhood.

—This week: the targeted killing of Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov by car bombing.

Also, a cafe bombing had happened in April 2023, and killed prominent pro-Kremlin blogger and war correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky. The blast at a St. Petersburg cafe during a close-quarters speaking event wounded some two dozen bystanders, six of them critically.

America’s CIA or Britain’s MI6 has long been suspected of also being involved in these targeted killings, or at least assisting in such brazen Ukrainian-linked operations, but ultimately little has been uncovered or proven in terms of a potential Western hidden hand in this ongoing ‘dirty war’.

Just before the market close on Friday, Nvidia unveiled its largest ever acquisition (which however was structured as a licensing deal to avoid anti-trust concerns) when it agreed to buy Groq – pardon license all of Grok’s assets and acquire its entire executive team – a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash. In reality what the deal is really about is Grok’s TPU expertise, and specifically the knowledge inside CEO Jonathan Ross’ head, who helped launch Google’s TPU, the search giant’s custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. 

The news was first reported by CNBC, citing Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s latest financing round in September. Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly (that part is true: the deal likely came together in the days following the recent dramatic ascent of Google’s Gemini and TPU architecture, not to mention stock price, as explained below).

Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion in September. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital (where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner). Groq said at the time it would use the funds to expand its data center capacity. Instead, the participating funds are about to 3x their money in 3 months, an unprecedented venture return, thanks to Nvidia’s massive cash hoard.

Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday that it’s “entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology,” without disclosing a price. Clearly, however, this is much more than just a licensing agreement since Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company’s president, and other senior leaders “will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” the post said.

As Bloomberg explains, sharing a slightly different perspective on how the deal is structured or rather wants to be structured, the world’s largest publicly traded company paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and will integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the startup’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said.

Groq will continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, existing finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO, it said Wednesday in a post on its website, which of course it will only pretend to be for regulatory and anti-trust reasons: Nvidia will have stripped all the good stuff, i.e., the TPU IP. It’s data center business, which offers outsourced computing, will continue, the company said in the post. 

Davis told CNBC that Nvidia is getting all of Groq’s assets, though its nascent Groq cloud business is not part of the transaction. Groq said “GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.”

The deal represents by far Nvidia’s largest purchase ever. The chipmaker’s biggest acquisition to date came in 2019, when it bought Israeli chip designer Mellanox for close to $7 billion. At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, up from $13.3 billion in early 2023. 

In an email to employees that was obtained by CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the agreement will expand Nvidia’s capabilities.

“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” Huang wrote, revealing the deal rationale. 

Groq has been targeting revenue of $500 million this year amid booming demand for AI accelerator chips used in speeding up the process for large language models to complete inference-related tasks. The company was not pursuing a sale when it was approached by Nvidia, Davis said. While it is unclear what is the actual LTM revenue, the acquisition represents a 40x multiple of its “targeted” sales… so do the math. 

So what is the reason for the deal? Well, as we explained in “The Google TPU: The Chip Made For The AI Inference Era“, in recent months Nvidia and its GPU architecture has lost momentum to Google and its TPU, which as noted above, is the “chip made for the inference era.” And so, instead of developing its own Tensor architecture, Nvidia decided to just buy it. Or rather, it pretends not to buy it as regulators may just kill the deal, which instead was structured as an asset-purchase/licensing deal. 

And the punchline: Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of former engineers, including CEO Ross. Ross is a former Google chip executive who helped start that company’s Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, the search giant’s custom chip that’s being used by some companies as an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units. As part of the deal, he and other top executives will join Nvidia “to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” Groq said in the statement. 

In its initial filing with the SEC, announcing a $10.3 million fundraising in late 2016, Groq listed as principals Ross and Douglas Wightman, an entrepreneur and former engineer at the Google X “moonshot factory.” Wightman left Groq in 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Huang added that, “While we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq’s IP, we are not acquiring Groq as a company.” Narrator: you are.

Nvidia has ramped up its investments in chip startups and the broader ecosystem as its cash pile has mounted. The company has backed AI and energy infrastructure company Crusoe, AI model developer Cohere, and boosted its investment in CoreWeave as the AI-centric cloud provider was getting ready to go public this year.

In September, Nvidia said it intended to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, with the startup committed to deploying at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia products. The companies have yet to announce a formal deal. That same month, Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a partnership.

Nvidia has been making investments in companies across the AI infrastructure ecosystem and is trying to keep a large lead in the market for inference — running models once they have been developed. The company’s leadership has already pledged billions to a wide variety of projects that it believes will further the overall AI industry. Nvidia agreed to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI and has even bought a stake in erstwhile nemesis Intel Corp.

By incorporating a new type of design into what it sells, Nvidia is showing willingness to be flexible and add novel capabilities. That approach is likely aimed at keeping its biggest customers and new adopters focused on its technology at a time when in-house efforts from Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. are gaining momentum as the industry rushes to install as much computing capacity as quickly as it can.

With today’s purchase, pardon, “licensing deal”, Nvidia has formally lobbed its response to Google’s recent ascent with its Ironwood TPU and Gemini AI, which saw a dramatic divergence in the Google vs Nvidia ecosystems (chart below).  The question now is will Google issue its own “code red” and pull every string in its power to kill the deal, or will it respond even more forcefully. One thing is certain: if Nvidia has now successfully caught up to Google and its TPU technology, the alligator jaws of the Google vs OpenAI/Nvidia chart are about to slam shut.

Authored by Lawrence Kadish via The Gatestone Institute,

There continues to be a debate among global geopolitical analysts regarding whether the United States and China are engaged in a Cold War or a competition for global dominance.

The answer is irrelevant.

By anyone’s observation, China seeks to dominate the 21st century, and they will do so by “any means necessary.”

In the process, they will use their military might to create a sphere of influence that is designed to cow nations that range from Japan to Australia to India.

Their invasion of Taiwan is almost a foregone conclusion among many military observers, who believe it is not a question of if but when.

But “when or if” China launches its amphibious assault, it will have determined that the United States is not willing to risk its armed forces to defend an island that produces the majority of the world’s computer chips, especially the most advanced ones.

China’s eventual decision to deploy its military throughout the Pacific Rim will likely be preceded by confidence in its ability to harness extraordinary advances in AI resulting from its access to unlimited, clean, inexpensive electricity available from fusion power.

It is an emerging technology currently the beneficiary of what is believed to be untold billions of Chinese yuan of investment. One executive at Brookhaven National Laboratory told me earlier this year:

“We have no idea how much they are truly spending because of the secrecy surrounding their efforts but we get the sense ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve a breakthrough in fusion.”

The strategic linkage is clear and without question.

Consider the facts: AI has the means to alter the course of a country’s history.

But to harness its full potential requires incredible amounts of energy. Create that energy, and AI becomes a 21st-century strategic weapon.

For far too long the United States failed to place its scientific and industrial might behind what might be called a 21st-century Manhattan Project, recalling the days of World War II when we won the race to create the atomic bomb.

That indifference has profoundly changed during the last quarter of 2025. The White House recently created an Office of Fusion within the Department of Energy, significantly elevating focus and urgency on this technology. Equally important is the announcement that President Donald J. Trump is getting into the fusion power business through a $6 billion merger between his social media company and the fusion research company TAE Technologies.

If there is any message that needs to be heard by China, it is that Trump recognizes that the winner of the fusion race will secure its nation’s future and dictate whether democracy and freedom will flourish or the misery of communism will fall upon tens of millions of people.

History may well view that out of all his accomplishments, the president’s investment in fusion was the one upon which the fate of nations was determined.

Toyota said it will start selling three U.S.-built models in Japan in 2026 — the Camry, Highlander, and Tundra — produced in Kentucky, Indiana, and Texas. The move is widely seen as part of Toyota’s effort to ease tensions with President Donald Trump over U.S. tariffs on Japanese vehicles and parts, according to Yahoo Finance.

“Toyota will be able to meet the diverse needs of a broad range of customers, while also helping to improve Japan–US trade relations,” the company said.

Yahoo writes that Toyota has been actively courting Trump’s favor, including Chairman Akio Toyoda’s high-profile appearance at a NASCAR event in Japan wearing a MAGA hat and a shirt with Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Earlier this year, Toyoda also suggested allowing U.S. automakers to sell cars in Japan through Toyota’s domestic dealer network — a proposal that fed into a trade deal calling on Japan to “open their country” to American vehicles.

Other Japanese automakers may follow Toyota, but analysts expect limited impact.

Bloomberg Intelligence’s Tatsuo Yoshida said: “All three models under discussion are large by Japanese standards, and left-hand drive remains a major psychological and practical barrier for most consumers.” He added, “Producing right-hand-drive versions in the U.S. for the Japanese market could unlock some demand, but even then vehicle-size constraints would cap volumes.”

Large vehicles traditionally struggle in Japan due to narrow roads and parking. Meanwhile, Toyota and the Japanese government are exploring regulatory changes to make imports easier, and NHK reported that those efforts are now moving forward.

Authored by Richard Porter via RealClearPolitics.com,

The scandal among the Somali community in Minnesota highlights a question to consider as we plunge deeper into the AI Age, an age in which some futurists, such as Elon Musk, suggest work will be optional: What’s the point of working?

In the beginning, there was no work: God’s punishment for Adam’s disobedience was tossing him from the Garden of Eden and condemning mankind to suffer through labor. 

And for millennia, man suffered and labored merely to exist and reproduce, as all other living things did on earth. But whether from eating from the Tree of Knowledge, intelligent design, or the vagaries of evolution, man has the capacity to reason and imagine, create and innovate that other animals do not have. 

As a result, humans no longer labor merely to exist, but to aspire, acquire, and achieve. We trade our labor for things we cannot or do not wish to make ourselves; to provide for future needs; to enjoy plenty, luxury, and convenience. Humans are social animals too, so we work with others to build what a single person could not, and to gain status or admiration from other humans. 

And we work to help those who cannot help themselves, mindful of the Biblical exhortation “I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Working to achieve the blessing of giving is integral to Americanism; Americans are the most generous people on earth. 

Now, in this golden age of plenty and peace, we consider again: What’s the point of working? And its corollary as well: What’s the point of giving? 

Eden – or heaven on earth – a place of contentment, ease, and mindless happiness, a place where work no longer exists, shimmers like a mirage on the horizon: thirsted for but never really in reach. 

Well now, in the AI Age, perhaps a return to Eden is in reach, but is this version of Eden – abundant slothfulness – really the pinnacle of human existence? 

To Somali refugees escaping civil war, death, destruction, and a bare subsistence economy, the U.S. offered a new life in which work was no longer required to subsist. At the cost of merely filling out and filing a form – and no doubt, even that “work” was done for them as well by a well-meaning social worker – the U.S. provided for all needs and even some wants. 

Each and every Somali refugee found a better life in the U.S. without working. So, no one should be surprised that 89% of Somali families with children receive public aid. 

Indeed, some clever refugees figured out that the generous, inattentive welfare state the U.S. had created with good intentions over the last 60 years offered a return to Eden. 

Just by breaking a few rules that no one was enforcing, filling out and filing some more forms, vast unimaginable wealth was available – and would actually be given to you. Enough, it turns out, to live in opulence and to provide most of the needs for sprawling clans back home as well. 

If we create an environment in which wealth can be achieved so easily just by breaking a few rules that no one enforces, was it wrong for a rational person to pursue wealth just by taking it? 

We placed refugees into a new Eden and merely said: Take fruit from these trees but not from that tree. 

Somalian refugees are not the only people who have discovered this glitch – this feature – in how we give. DOGE started a process, which is ongoing, uncovering the startling extent to which government giving is gamed. 

For example, the Department of Agriculture has asked each state to provide the name, address, and Social Security number of each person receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance) benefits. More than 20 states have refused to comply, but in studying the data on those that did, the government discovered over 150,000 dead people receiving benefits, hundreds of thousands more taking benefits from more than one state, and of course fake Social Security numbers. 

It turns out it’s easy to cheat the government, and most state governments are actually actively trying not to find the fraud. And it’s not just in the welfare state; it appears to be systemic in the social service grant-making world as well. 

The Somali experience is turning out to be an inadvertent social policy experiment complete with lessons, about both work and generosity. 

• First, giving with lax, unenforced rules is akin to giving without rules, which is an invitation to live in Eden – an invitation many will accept. 

• Second, Eden is good for animals, but it’s actually not the pinnacle of human existence so long as humans have the capacity to think, create, imagine, and aspire. 

• Third, work may be a curse for humans focused on subsistence, but it’s a blessing for humans thinking, creating, imagining, aspiring, trading, acquiring, achieving – and giving. 

• Fourth, giving as an output of human labor is better than receiving, because receiving discourages work and work is how one is blessed with the ability to give – so we need to beware of thoughtless, unstructured giving that discourages work. 

In our golden age, as our means to give grows, and as “work” itself becomes “optional,” we need to anticipate the paradox of working, giving, and getting. We still live in a world of scarcity, but we continue to create abundance through freely trading or selling work, and giving is a beneficial consequence of working. But getting undermines the will to work, which diminishes future giving. 

Giving and getting can never be a replacement for working and giving. If we ignore this, offering a new Eden to all without work, human will experience a painful fall from grace once again.