The Economics Of Santa Claus

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.

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 07:00

If Jesus Were Born Today, Would He Survive The American Police State?

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.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 22:45

American Holiday Essentials

While every family celebrates the holiday season a little differently, each with its own sets of customs and traditions, there are things that most celebrants can agree on, things that are considered essential for a merry Christmas.

As Statista's Felix Richter reports, according to Statista Consumer Insights, a Christmas tree in the house tops the list of holiday must-haves this year, with 57 percent of Americans considering it essential to a proper celebration.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Some proper holiday tunes (there's more than "Last Christmas") and Christmas movies, think “Home Alone”, “Love Actually” and (to some) “Die Hard”, are other key ingredients to the holiday season with 50 and 47 percent of Americans calling both essential traditions, respectively.

When asked about what they are looking forward to most thinking about the holiday season, Americans show that community and family still beat the commercial aspects of the holidays.

67 percent of the respondents look forward to spending time with friends and family, making it the top answer by far.

Interestingly Americans also prefer giving presents (52 percent) over receiving them (32 percent), showing that not all is lost for Christmas romantics.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 20:30

The Piercing Cold Of Christmas

Authored by Andrew Fowler via RealClearReligion,

Christmas evokes a warmth during the winter: bright lights, roaring fires, and good cheer with loved ones. However, as St. Andrew’s Novena distinctly emphasizes, the “piercing cold” conditions of the first Christmas starkly contrast with the holiday season’s comforts, beckoning us to not only recognize Christ’s humility, but to care for the poor, forgotten, and the suffering.  

The novena — spanning from the apostle’s feast day (November 30) to Christmas Eve — is prayed fifteen times a day. And while its roots are nebulous, most likely originating from Ireland, it humbly presents the harsh realities the Holy Family endured “at midnight, in Bethlehem” that further reveal God’s infinite love. By subverting the typical grandeur of royal births, instead embracing the “piercing” elements in a stable, Christ, in this singular instance, revolutionized the course of history and humanity’s relationship with each other.

In so doing, God honors the poor and marginalized’s inherent dignity in perpetuity. Indeed, salvation is not reserved for merely the powerful, but also those who are deemed lowly. As Christ would teach during his earthly ministry, “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”

Certainly, one can reflect why “the Word became flesh” more than 2,000 years ago and not at any other point in time. However, in the centuries since, critics argue Christians purloined pagan myths and holidays, particularly Christmas; and there is a general consensus Jesus’s birth did not coincide with December 25. 

To be sure, the Gospels do not specify a date — but this does not negate Christmas Day’s historicity. Jesus’s birth is no myth. He was born in time — living, suffering, dying, and rising on the third day in ancient Israel. And much like the “piercing cold” of Christmas, He was pierced with a lance on Calvary. 

In the wake of his resurrection, the seismic event in history, his disciples continue to proclaim this reality. Indeed, Christ’s death — much like His birth — subverted prior conceptions of class, race, wealth, and power. In the ancient world, the very idea of Jesus’s divinity, after dying via crucifixion, was considered “scandalous, obscene, grotesque” because, as Tom Holland notes in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, divinity was reserved for the “greatest of the great — for victors, and heroes, and kings.” 

If one believes in the Resurrection, then one must reconcile with his birth’s wonderfully contradictory nature: that poverty and eternal glory occupied the manger, as it did on the cross on Good Friday.  

This is precisely why the St. Andrew’s Novena’s call to reflect on his birth’s environment is imperative — because of its physicality. The Holy Family was poor; they uprooted from Nazareth to Bethlehem to comply with a Roman census; the Blessed Mother endured labor pains; they unsuccessfully searched for proper lodgings; and, while amongst animals, the wind struck them in the darkest hours. But precisely in this dark hour, Christ — the light of the world — broke into history. In fact, His life is history.

The first Christmas echoes daily in our own hearts, to believers and non-believers alike. Like that “piercing cold” night, Jesus continually knocks, seeking to transform and heal us. But as Pope Benedict XVI asked in a 2012 Christmas homily, “[D]o we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself?” 

These questions extend to our treatment of neighbors, the impoverished, and those suffering temporally, mentally, and spiritually. Indeed, everyone is infinitely loved, formed in the image and likeness of God. Yet, too often, we fall short of this mission. However, as Pope Leo XIV reminds us in his first apostolic exhortation, Dilexi Te, caring for those around us, particularly the poor, “has always been a central part” of Church tradition. Moreover, Christian charity serves as “a beacon as it were of evangelical light to illumine the hearts and guide the decisions of Christians in every age.”

Ultimately, Christmas is a day of gratitude — not only for those in our lives and the gifts received, but God’s blessings, sacrifice, and love. Yet St. Andrew’s Novena offers the opportunity to reflect on the elements Christ endured for our salvation, not only on Good Friday, but also at midnight in Bethlehem.

As we cozy up in warm blankets, carols, gifts, libations, and merriment, may we commit ourselves to also remember, in a tangible way, the poor and those suffering from the “piercing cold” afflictions of the day. In them, we will find Christ — our great hope. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 19:45

US Or China? The Nation That Wins The Nuclear Fusion Race Wins Global Primacy

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.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 18:25

Toyota Will Export American-Made Vehicles To Japan Next Year To Please The Trump Administration

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.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 17:50

Work, Welfare, & The Illusion Of A New Eden

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. 

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 17:15

Canada Is Building The Wrong Army For The War That Is Coming

Authored by Andrew Latham via RealClearDefense,

The next major land war will not reward elegance, boutique modernization, or the comforting belief that advanced technology can replace mass and endurance. It will expose armies built on fragile assumptions. Concealment has largely disappeared. Attrition has returned as a central fact of combat. Sustainment shapes outcomes as decisively as firepower. Yet the Canadian Army remains organized, equipped, and intellectually anchored to a vision of warfare that belonged to yesterday’s world. The problem is not a simple modernization lag or a lack of new kit. It is a deeper conceptual failure—a refusal to absorb how radically and irreversibly the character of land warfare has changed.

That is the larger point. The key change is not this or that technology. The battlespace itself has changed. Artificial intelligence, proliferated drones, commercial satellites, autonomous strike systems, and persistent ISR have combined into a transparent, data-rich battlespace where everyone is on the move, movement is tracked instantly, concentrations are targeted rapidly, and supply lines are targeted as soon as they begin to form—an environment already documented in assessments of modern conflict. An army that cannot scatter, regenerate while under fire, and sustain itself while under persistent observation is not going to muddle through. It is going to break.

Transparency and the End of Concealment

Western armies have operated on the assumptions of concealment and intermittent detection for a generation. Those assumptions are no longer valid. The contemporary battlespace is full of aerial surveillance, open-source commercial satellite imagery, digital emissions that reveal every vehicle and headquarters location, and loitering munitions that make ground above those locations perpetually contested—patterns captured in recent operational analyses.

The issue is time: the time between being discovered and being targeted. The time between when a headquarters can command and when it becomes a targeting point. The time between declaring a movement and becoming a target.

Survival requires dispersion, deception, mobility, and an entire operating paradigm built on the idea that you are observed all the time. The Canadian Army knows about the emergence of drones, ISR, and digital exposure, but it has not yet internalized the ways that they change land warfare’s fundamentals.

Attrition Has Returned—and Canada Is Not Ready

Precision fires promised surgical, inexpensive war. In reality, they have intensified attrition: the ability to strike targets more often, more reliably, and more predictably. Ukraine has demonstrated the scale of this shift: modern war is industrial, not surgical. It consumes people, equipment, ammunition, drones, and spare parts at rates far beyond what most Western forces planned for in peacetime, as shown by studies of wartime industrial demand.

The Canadian Army is not designed for this reality. It is small and brittle. It is optimized for controlled, expeditionary contributions, not for open-ended, high-intensity conflict. Ammunition stocks are low. Maintenance capacity is thin. Replacement cycles are slow. Mobilization—across industry, reserve forces, and training pipelines—is largely theoretical, even as official modernization documents highlight the fragility of the current model.

You can have a small and lethal army if it is small and lethal through design and deliberate choice. You cannot have a small, hollow, and unprepared army if it has to fight for extended periods. In an attritional war, those features are decisive.

Sustainment as a Front-Line Fight

The rise of long-range strike, drones, and cyber means that the old rear area is no more. Supply lines are now a front-line fight from start to finish. Supply depots, railheads, ports, repair facilities, and fuel infrastructure are all high-priority targets. If an enemy cannot stop forward brigades, it will attempt to starve them. Analyses of modern logistics under fire emphasize that industrial capacity and resilient supply networks—not efficiency—determine strategic endurance.

An army for the future must be able to fight under conditions of intermittent resupply, contested and damaged infrastructure, disrupted and overloaded communications, and near-constant threats to supply lines. Planning and organization must prioritize resilience, redundancy, and regeneration rather than peacetime efficiency and timeliness.

The Canadian Army still plans as if reliable resupply were a given and rear areas could stay intact. The moment a capable adversary enters the fight, those assumptions are shattered.

Dispersion, Autonomy, and Command Under Fire

Land warfare favors armies that can fight dispersed but connected, decentralized but coordinated. Small units must be able to operate at will even when isolated or cut off. Junior leaders must be able to act without micromanagement. Commanders must know their communications will be lost and they must be able to exercise control while that loss is happening. Contemporary doctrinal analysis underscores exactly this requirement for decentralized command in contested environments.

This is a question of more than new radios or drones. It is also a cultural issue. The instinct for centralization, risk aversion, and procedural control stems from the experience of peacekeeping and counterinsurgency missions, not from the needs of a high-tech, fully contested battlespace.

The institutional habits and instincts of the Canadian Army are still oriented to a previous world. It is those habits that will be unprepared when the next world comes.

The Arctic and Continental Reality

Canada’s geography adds to the problem. The Arctic is no longer a distant, largely theoretical frontier. It is now a theatre of competition defined by opposing surveillance architectures, long-range strike systems, and critical infrastructure vulnerabilities—conditions mapped in recent assessments of Arctic security. Continental defense is no longer just about aerospace warning. It is also about protecting energy networks, ports, radar sites, satellite uplinks, and the digital infrastructure that underpins modern life, as reflected in NATO’s forward defense posture.

A land force built for small contributions overseas cannot do all that. Canada needs an army that is also oriented toward persistent continental defense, NATO high-intensity operations, and hybrid resiliency. Canada does not have that. Instead, it has something far smaller and far less capable—an assessment echoed in recent readiness evaluations.

Radical Redesign, Not Cautious Incrementalism

Add drones, experiment with AI tools, rewrite doctrine. It is the typical Ottawa response to a problem of this nature. It is also not remotely enough. This is a structural problem, not a superficial one. Canada faces a conceptual failure, not a cosmetic one. A conceptual failure cannot be solved by bolt-on solutions.

What is needed is redesign. Force structure, reserves, sustainment, mobilization, training, and even strategic purpose must be rethought. This means jettisoning some assumptions that have been bedrock in Canadian defence since the Kosovo and Afghanistan era. It also means facing political realities about cost, scale, and what it is to be a responsible nation in this new moment. Emerging analysis of “hiding vs. finding,” sensor-shooter compression, and mass-versus-quality dynamics illustrates how unforgiving the next battlespace will be.

Optimism that everything is fine is a costly illusion. The faster you are wrong, the greater the cost.

The Cost of Illusion

The transformation of land warfare is happening before our eyes, under real fire. Armies that adapt late lose deterrence, relevancy, and influence. Canada does not need the biggest army in NATO. It needs an army designed for the realities of transparent, attritional, technologically saturated land warfare where endurance—not elegance—is the definition of combat power, themes reinforced in the latest assessments of the future competitive security environment.

Steel will matter. Silicon will matter. But none of it will matter until Canada has rethought how it prepares for land war – and makes the necessary changes. Waiting until events force that remaking is asking for a much harder reckoning in far worse circumstances down the road.

Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 16:05

Russia Captures Another Ukrainian Town While Zelensky Still Insists On Altering Trump Peace Plan

Russian forces continue their steady battlefield gains this week, but Kiev is still seeking to grasp at establishing some sort of leverage at the negotiating table, as the Trump peace plan is still being pushed in back-and-forth US dialogue with Moscow representatives. 

Over the past some 24 hours, Russian troops have captured the settlement of Zarechnoye in the southeast Zaporozhye Region, according to the defense ministry (MoD). "Battlegroup East units kept advancing deep into the enemy’s defenses and liberated the settlement of Zarechnoye in the Zaporozhye Region," the MoD said Wednesday according to TASS.

via Reuters

The military further issued a grim figure, claiming that the Ukrainian army lost over 1,400 troops in a single day across all front line areas. Additional armor and combat vehicles were also reportedly destroyed.

After weeks ago Ukraine finally lost the strategic logistics hub of Pokrovsk, it's been setback after setback for Kiev from there. The pace of Russia's advance has only steadily increased. Reuters conveys Ukraine's response, which seeks to frame it as a strategic retreat:

Ukrainian forces have pulled out of the embattled eastern town of Siversk, Kyiv's military said on Tuesday, as Russian troops wage a battlefield offensive aimed at threatening key cities critical to Ukraine's defences in the east. Sloviansk is a northern anchor of the so-called "fortress belt" of cities in Ukraine's heavily industrialised Donbas region, which Russia has demanded Kyiv cede before it ends its war.
"The invaders were able to advance due to a significant numerical advantage and constant pressure from small assault groups in difficult weather conditions," Ukraine's General Staff said in a statement.
It said it had withdrawn soldiers to preserve lives and resources, adding that they had, however, inflicted heavy losses on the enemy.

And yet, President Volodymyr Zelensky is still pressing for a fresh meeting with President Donald Trump to discuss "sensitive issues" - given Washington and Moscow seem closer than ever to reaching common understanding on the peace deal, after the Miami meetings.

Zelensky has laid out that territorial control of Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland remains unresolved. The US plan hinges on Ukraine giving up territory, specifically in the east where its forces are clearly on the backfoot.

"We are ready for a meeting with the United States at the leaders’ level to address sensitive issues. Matters such as territorial questions must be discussed at the leaders' level," said Zelensky in comments released by his office on Wednesday.

Russia is currently reviewing the latest draft from the US side, after marathon talks in Florida, and a response is soon expected from President Putin.

Below is how Russian media presents Ukraine's current attempts to modify the Trump plan, providing insights into the main disagreements:

Zelensky disclosed the details during a briefing with journalists on Wednesday, claiming the draft largely reflects a joint Ukrainian-American position, while several key issues remain unresolved.

Among the most contentious provisions is the proposal regarding the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which is currently fully controlled by Russian forces. Kiev wants the plant to be jointly operated by Ukraine and the US on a 50-50 basis instead of Washington’s proposed trilateral management involving Russia.

The territorial issue, described as the most difficult, would also place the burden of concessions on Russia despite its vast military gains. One option outlined in the plan would require Russian forces to withdraw from Ukraine’s Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Sumy, and Nikolayev regions, while freezing the conflict along current front lines in Russia’s Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson regions. 

And there's also this point of contention, per the same report: "Provisions previously linked to Russian language rights and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have been replaced with broadly worded commitments to educational programs promoting tolerance and anti-racism."

Kiev still insists on a mere freezing of the front lines, and not a permanent political settlement of the eastern territories' status. Zelensky has proposed that troops "remain where we are".

The Kremlin's demands for territory actually includes areas where some Ukrainian forces are still present. Putin has warned that this either gets settled at the negotiating table or on the battlefield, and has rejected any short-term 'freeze' which won't ultimately solve the crisis.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 15:30

How The Soviets Replaced Christmas With A Socialist Winter Holiday

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Leftist revolutionaries have long been in the habit of reworking the calendar so as to make it easier to force the population into new habits and new ways of life better suited to the revolutionaries themselves.

The French revolutionaries famously abolished the usual calendar, replacing it with a ten-day week system with three weeks in each month. The months were all renamed. Christian feast days and holidays were replaced with commemorations of plants like turnips and cauliflower.

The Soviet communists attempted major reforms to the calendar themselves. Among these was the abolition of the traditional week with its Sundays off and predictable seven-day cycles.

That experiment ultimately failed, but the Soviets did succeed in eradicating many Christian traditional holidays in a country that had been for centuries influenced by popular adherence to the Eastern Orthodox Christian religion.

Once the communists took control of the Russian state, the usual calendar of religious holidays was naturally abolished. Easter was outlawed, and during the years when weekends were removed, Easter was especially difficult to celebrate, even privately.

But perhaps the most difficult religious holiday to suppress was Christmas, and much of this is evidenced in the fact that Christmas wasn’t so much abolished as replaced by a secular version with similar rituals.

Emily Tamkin writes at Foreign Policy:

Initially, the Soviets tried to replace Christmas with a more appropriate komsomol (youth communist league) related holiday, but, shockingly, this did not take. And by 1928 they had banned Christmas entirely, and Dec. 25 was a normal working day.

Then, in 1935, Josef Stalin decided, between the great famine and the Great Terror, to return a celebratory tree to Soviet children. But Soviet leaders linked the tree not to religious Christmas celebrations, but to a secular new year, which, future-oriented as it was, matched up nicely with Soviet ideology.

Ded Moroz [a Santa Claus-like figure] was brought back. He found a snow maid from folktales to provide his lovely assistant, Snegurochka. The blue, seven-pointed star that sat atop the imperial trees was replaced with a red, five-pointed star, like the one on Soviet insignia. It became a civic, celebratory holiday, one that was ritually emphasized by the ticking of the clock, champagne, the hymn of the Soviet Union, the exchange of gifts, and big parties.

In the context of these celebrations, the word “Christmas” was replaced by “winter.” According to a Congressional report from 1965,

The fight against the Christian religion, which is regarded as a remnant of the bourgeois past, is one of the main aspects of the struggle to mold the new “Communist man.” … the Christmas Tree has been officially abolished, Father Christmas has become Father Frost, the Christmas Tree has become the Winter Tree, the Christmas Holiday the Winter Holiday. Civil-naming ceremonies are substituted for christening and confirmation, so far without much success.

It is perhaps significant that Stalin found the Santa Claus aspect of Christmas worth preserving, and Stalin apparently calculated that a father figure bearing gifts might be useful after all.

According to a 1949 article in The Virginia Advocate,

at children’s gatherings in the holiday season … grandfather frost lectures on good Communist behavior. He customarily ends his talk with the question “to whom do we owe all the good things in our socialist society?” To which, it is said, the children chorus the reply, ‘Stalin.’

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 15:05

Naval Reactors For AI Data Centers

Commerce Scretary Lutnick appeared on Fox News, discussing new energy for data centers.

As we have noted previously, energy prices continue to spike near data center facilities across the US. Lutnick claimed data centers are going to provide additional power generation and capacity to the grid along with the construction of their facilities to lower the energy prices, but so far this has not been the case.

The additional costs of infrastructure to the wider grid that come with higher demand are not covered in the higher rates paid by the hyperscalers. Many of the costs extend to equipment outside of the immediate vicinity of the new power consumer, such as upgrades and maintenance to upstream transformers and powerlines. Maybe the rest of the US should copy what Texas does...

Make "behind the meter" mandatory https://t.co/ZEcmX5Ge0e pic.twitter.com/bCBnwx2E5g

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 24, 2025

And while multiple companies and developers are working on solutions for on-site, "behind-the-meter" power for AI data centers - with little practical success to date - one power developer has formally proposed an idea that has been informally discussed for years. 

HGP Intelligent Energy, a Texas power developer, is proposing to use reactors from US Navy submarines and aircraft carriers to power a data center project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The company claims redirecting two retired naval reactors could produce about 450-520 MW of power in what would be the fastest way to add new baseload power to the grid while the commercial nuclear industry struggles to get back on its feet.

The likelihood of this proposal being accepted by the US government is extremely low. The idea that the government will allow a private company, even with deep coordination with the DoE/DoW, to own or operate one of the most strategic assets in the US government’s arsenal, is absurd. Naval reactors have multiple differences compared to traditional commercial reactors, most notably the extremely high enriched uranium content, which is over 90%, compared to traditional reactors which are less than 5%.

In addition to concerns about proliferation of weapons grade uranium, there are also concerns of how the reactors can operate after they are removed from their submarines or carriers. The reactors are removed from their vessels and decommissioned due to no longer being able to operate as designed at their old age. There are likely multiple concerns with safely operating the reactor in its aged status with respect to reactor physics and material integrity. You can't just stick lower enriched fuel inside a reactor designed for highly enriched fuel, the geometry of the core alone will likely not allow for proper operation.

Still, the recommendation of involving the nuclear navy with the reinvigoration of the nuclear industry does hold value. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program is the most successful nuclear program in history, with over 7500 reactor years of safe operation. Their expertise with reactor plant construction and operation would likely benefit the commercial nuclear industry in multiple ways.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 14:40

"Stupid In America" Turns 20

Authored by Larry Sand via American Greatness,

In January 2006, ABC’s John Stossel’s brutally honest documentary, “Stupid in America,” first aired. At the time, he referred to it as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it.”

Stossel exposed the ineffectiveness of many government-run schools. But now, 20 years later, things are even worse.

Test scores from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this year, show that 33% of 8th graders—a higher percentage than ever—are reading at the “below basic” level.

Additionally, only 22% of high school seniors are proficient in math, down from 24% in 2019, and 35% are proficient in reading—the lowest score since NAEP began in 1969—down from 37% in 2019. Also, a record-high percentage scored at “below basic” levels in both math and reading compared with all previous assessments.

The results of the latest NAEP U.S. history and civics tests, administered in 2022, were atrocious. The scores show that just 13% of 8th-graders met proficiency standards in U.S. history, meaning they could explain key themes, periods, events, people, ideas, and turning points in the country’s history. Additionally, about 20% of students scored at or above the proficient level in civics. Both scores are the lowest ever recorded on these two tests.

The most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a test administered to 650,000 4th and 8th graders in 64 countries, reveals that average U.S. math scores declined sharply between 2019 and 2023, falling 18 points for 4th graders and 27 points for 8th graders. Internationally, this places the U.S. 22nd of 63 education systems for 4th-grade math and 20th of 45 education systems for 8th-grade math.

Furthermore, average U.S. math scores for 4th- and 8th-grade students reverted to 1995 levels, the first year the TIMSS assessment was administered.

Could a lack of spending be the problem?

Hardly. According to Just Facts, which researches and publishes verifiable data on the critical public policy issues of our time, the U.S. spent about $1.4 trillion on education in 2024. The bulk of the spending, $946 billion, goes to elementary and secondary education, while $277 billion is spent on higher education and $130 billion on libraries and other educational services. This total breaks down to $10,237 per household in the U.S., 4.6% of the U.S. gross domestic product, and 13% of the government’s current expenditures.

Would smaller class sizes help?

Again, no. Nationally, class size has been shrinking over time. Since 1921, the student-to-teacher ratio has fallen from 33:1 to 16:1. The subject was analyzed extensively by Hoover Institution senior fellow Eric Hanushek, who examined 277 studies on the effects of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement. He found that 15% of the studies showed an improvement in achievement, 72% saw no impact, and 13% found that reducing class size had an adverse effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that children might benefit from a small-class environment in some cases, he says there is no way “to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.”

If schools aren’t emphasizing the basics, what are they teaching instead?

Sex and gender nonsense, for one. The Heritage Foundation discloses that 16 states force transgender lessons on children. The organization’s “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy” report highlights the education standards and frameworks of states that encourage gender ideology, defined as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”

The National Education Association, which holds enormous power over the nation’s teachers and students, plays an outsized role in sex indoctrination. At its most recent national convention in July, the NEA instructed teachers on the nuances of so-called “neopronouns and xeopronouns,” while also instructing them on ways to subvert conservative “villains” and their own “internal oppression.”

In Seattle, schools ask students as young as ten years old probing questions about gender identity, according to internal documents obtained by National Review. “The survey results are then shared with a group of third-party organizations for research purposes, including Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute and the local county government. Other regions of the country distribute similar surveys under various names.”

Forcing left-wing politics on students is also fashionable. A report by the Goldwater Institute, released in January, shows how politically skewed our schools are. The organization reports that about 25% of American classrooms use Marxist Howard Zinn’s work.

Zinn’s best-selling book, A People’s History of the United States, which is used in conjunction with the online “Zinn Education Project,” misinforms students and borrows from Karl Marx to present American history as a “conflict between capital and labor,” Goldwater discloses.

The question then becomes, what do we do about decaying, perverted, and far-left government-run schools?

The best scenario would be the total privatization of education, but that will never happen. Short of that, parental choice is best, which, as I noted last week, is expanding rapidly.

Today, more than 1.5 million students across 34 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico participate in 75 programs. The momentum behind school choice stems from families seeking alternatives to government-run schools.

But with about 54 million school-age children in the U.S., the vast majority still attend public schools.

For real change to happen, parents need to step up. In states without a private choice program, the best option for parents is to educate their children at home, just as they provide food, clothing, and shelter. In fact, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States during the 2024-2025 school year, with an average increase of 5.4%. This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic growth rate of about 2%.

Ronald Reagan once famously quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.’” Too many children are miseducated these days, and to turn things around, we must stop looking to the government for solutions.

Being stupid in America doesn’t have to be an ongoing condition, and for the sake of our children and the country’s future, things need to change—ASAP!

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 14:15

Land Of Confusion: The Great Reset In Motion

Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardian.org,

The global disruptions we have seen in recent years are frequently presented as a chaotic sequence of events: a ‘pandemic’, inflation, energy shortages and war.

Little wonder that most people are confused. However, a structural analysis reveals a more deliberate controlled demolition of the 20th-century social contract.

We are witnessing a transition from a productive capitalist model, which required a healthy mass labour force, to what Yanis Varoufakis calls a techno-feudalist order.

The engine of this transition was a desperate financial stabilisation strategy carried out by means of a public health event. As identified by Professor Fabio Vighi, the global financial system reached a point of terminal instability in late 2019, evidenced by the collapse of the US repo market (where banks lend to each other).

By freezing the real economy through lockdowns, central banks performed massive liquidity injections to save the banking-finance tier. If that money had entered a functioning economy, it would have triggered hyper-inflation. By keeping the population at home, the elite performed a stealth bailout that preserved the dominance of the financial class by sacrificing the productive middle class.

However, a geopolitical reset also had to take place. For decades, Germany’s economy relied on three pillars: cheap Russian gas, high-tech exports to China and a US security umbrella. By late 2025, all three have been fractured. As Prof Michael Hudson notes, the ‘sabotage’ of the Nord Stream pipelines was a structural necessity for the Western financial elite.

If Germany continued to integrate with Russia and China, it would have created a power pole independent of the US dollar. The conflict in Ukraine served a purpose: it resulted in Germany replacing Russian pipeline gas and being forced into a massive build-out of liquefied natural gas (LNG) infrastructure and reliance on LNG from the US. Unlike pipeline gas, LNG must be super-cooled, shipped and re-gasified, a process that is inherently 3–4 times more expensive.

The result is that, in 2025, German industrial output is at its lowest since the 1990s. Heavy industries like BASF (chemicals) and ThyssenKrupp (steel) are relocating to the US or China. Meanwhile, Germany is pivoting from an industrial giant by betting on creating jobs in the likes of the green energy sector (including becoming a ‘hydrogen hub’), semiconductors and microelectronics, robotics and biotech and diverting its capital into a €150 billion annual defence spend.

At the same time, while Germany collapses, the City of London thrives on global volatility. Among other things, the City is the global hub for war risk insurance and energy brokerage. When a pipeline is destroyed or a strategically important shipping lane is threatened, the price of war risk insurance triples. The London insurance market (Lloyd’s) extracts these ‘risk premiums’ from the global economy.

The City’s brokers treat geopolitical instability as a volatile asset class. Even as British households are crushed by energy bills, the financial centre remains profitable by extracting wealth from the very chaos that foreign policy helps to manufacture.

Moreover, the City of London has secured its position as the indispensable middleman of the transatlantic energy pivot. While the physical gas originates in the US and is consumed in Europe, the financial and legal architecture of this trade is almost entirely managed in London.

Commodity brokers and exchanges like ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) in London have seen record volumes in LNG futures and derivatives. These are financial bets on the future price of gas. As volatility increases, the fees and commissions extracted by London-based traders and clearinghouses skyrocket.

More than 90% of the world’s marine insurance, including the specialised, high-premium coverage required for LNG tankers, is underwritten through Lloyd’s. By enforcing strict war risk premiums on any ship entering European waters, London effectively imposes a private tax on every molecule of gas that replaces the lost Russian pipeline supply.

This ensures that while European industry is struggling with high energy costs, the City’s financial firms extract a massive toll from the logistics of the replacement supply.

Of course, the structural readjustment of economies leads to huge social tensions.

This is where the ‘Russian threat’ comes in. It has been elevated to an all-encompassing internal narrative used to manage domestic dissent and to galvanise the public to rally behind the flag. The bogeyman serves a vital psychological function by converting the growing anger of the impoverished into a patriotic duty to endure hardship.

Under this regime of ‘permanent emergency’, any industrial action, protest or systemic critique can be branded as malign foreign influence or subversion, allowing the state to use new, expansive policing powers to suppress internal friction.

To justify the redirection of billions in tax revenue away from failing public services and into the military-industrial complex to create ‘growth’ in a failing economy (a desperate attempt to revive a collapsing neoliberalism—see chapter two here), the state must maintain a high-decibel level of existential fear. In the UK, the Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 explicitly frames militarisation as an engine for growth, using the spectre of a Russian invasion to legitimise a state-subsidised transfer of wealth to high-tech defence contractors.

By manufacturing a permanent state of war-footing, the elite ensure that a main pillar of the economy is the one that directly serves the security of the state, while the population is told that their dwindling healthcare and pensions are a necessary sacrifice for national survival.

In this respect, we also see the changing status of the human being. In the industrial era, the state ‘subscribed’ to the working class, investing in the NHS and education because it required a fit population to drive production. Artificial intelligence, robotics and economic decline increasingly make much of this labour force redundant.

As capital may no longer find the reproduction of labour desirable or profitable, the state withdraws its subscription. The visible rot in the NHS is the result of deliberate divestment. (The UK private health insurance market has surged to a record £8.64 billion, a nearly 14% year-on-year increase.)

If the worker is no longer required for production, the state views healthcare as a ‘non-performing cost’ to be liquidated.

When a population is no longer an asset but a fiscal liability, the state moves from care to managing exit. It’s no accident that we have seen calls for the rapid legalisation of assisted suicide across the West. It might also help to explain the prescribing of midazolam and do not resuscitate orders in care homes during the COVID event. Data shows that the UK government purchased vast quantities of midazolam (two years’ worth of stock in just two months) in early 2020.

In 2025, official impact assessments noted that legalising assisted dying would result in “considerable cost savings” for the NHS and state pension system—estimated at up to £18.3 million within a decade for pensions alone. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill Impact Assessment (May 2025) officially quantified the ‘benefits and pensions’ impact. It estimated that by year 10, the state would save roughly £27.7 million per year in unpaid pension and benefit payments due to assisted deaths.

By accelerating the ‘offboarding’ of the non-productive elderly (whatever happened to the COVID era marketing slogan of ‘saving granny’?), the system wipes billions in future pension liabilities off the state balance sheet.

Moving forward, what can we expect? We will see the elite continue to rollout the narrative of permanent emergency under the guise of climate crisis and Russian threat to provide the ideological discipline required to justify a boosted austerity.

Meanwhile, digital ID and central bank digital currencies will create a system of total surveillance. In this emerging system, the citizen is replaced by the ‘managed subject’, whose access to the economy is contingent upon a social credit score.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 13:25

"Clean Up Your Act": Nearly 100 Minnesota Mayors Speak Out Against 'Fraud, Unchecked Spending'

Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Almost 100 Minnesota mayors banded together to tell Gov. Tim Walz and state lawmakers that they object to citizens suffering from higher taxes and reduced services—problems they blame on state spending and rampant government program fraud.

The Minnesota capitol building in St. Paul, Minn., on Dec. 8, 2025.Jenn Ackerman for The Epoch Times

The message, conveyed in a two-page letter, can best be summed up by saying, “Clean up your act,” Diane Cash, mayor of Crosby, a small city in north-central Minnesota, told The Epoch Times on Dec. 23, a day after the letter was sent.

The mayors are urging state leaders, “Put the brakes on the spending—and compare the spending to the results that you’re getting for your dollars,” Cash said.

She said it’s significant and unusual for that many mayors to line up and take a stand.

Cash said the movement began with nine mayors “and grew from there.” In all, 98 of the state’s mayors signed the letter—a mayoral coalition representing about 11.5 percent of the state’s 856 cities. The mayors of the state’s two largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, both Democrat strongholds, were absent from the group, who hail from mostly small and mid-size cities across the state.

Many mayoral posts in Minnesota are nonpartisan, Cash said, and their concerns should also be bipartisan.

“It’s not Republican or Democrat,” she said.

The mayors’ main concern: Their cities are getting insufficient funds from the state to pay for basic services. Cash said, “We all asked for road money, and we’re just not getting it.”

At the same time, citizens are seeing taxes go up while the state burned through an $18 billion budget surplus—and is now facing a $3 billion deficit. That’s according to the state economic forecast report.

Those figures come amid a federal prosecutor’s estimate that $9 billion may have been lost to fraud in the state’s generous social-services programs since 2018.

“Every taxpayer in Minnesota is paying too much, and too much is disappearing,” Cash said.

In the letter, the mayors wrote that “fraud, unchecked spending and inconsistent fiscal management” at the state level are hitting cities. As a result, the mayors are struggling “to plan responsibly, maintain infrastructure, hire and retain employees, and sustain core services.”

The mayors say the state relied on the one-time surplus to pay for programs that require ongoing funding; now it likely cannot sustain existing programs or invest in new ones.

The Epoch Times sought comment from Walz and received no reply prior to publication time.

A local TV station, KSTP, reported that a spokeswoman sent a statement on Walz’s behalf. “The Governor’s focus on lowering property taxes is exactly why he has provided more funding than any administration in history directly to local governments.”

“The surplus went directly back into the bottom line of local governments: $300 million for their police and fire departments, the largest infrastructure budgets in state history ... the largest-ever increase in flexible local government aid, and property tax relief directly to taxpayers.”

However, the mayors’ letter says: “Cities are the level of government closest to the people, responding when snowplows don’t arrive, when streetlights or water mains fail, when businesses need permitting help, or when seniors seek support.

“Every unfunded mandate or cost shift forces us into difficult choices: raise taxes, cut services, delay infrastructure, or stretch thin city staff even further,” the mayors said. “This strain now extends to the very core of community safety—our police officers and firefighters.”

Because of rising levies and “state-imposed costs,” cities are having trouble affording additional public safety staff, the mayors wrote.

Citing the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, the mayors also said Minnesota is “slipping in national economic rankings.” Among the 50 states, Minnesota ranks 46th in growth of median household income; the North Star State also ranks worse than at least 30 states on measures such as job growth, labor force growth, and “overall tax competitiveness.”

On average, cities and counties alike are poised to levy taxes exceeding 8 percent for 2026, the mayors said, adding: “These increases are not simply local decisions; they stem directly from state policies, mandates, and cost shifts that leave cities with no choice but to pass these burdens on to homeowners and businesses.”

The one-two punch of increased taxes and reduced services seems to hit harder in a small city like Crosby, population 2,300, Cash said. About 22 percent of residents live at the poverty level, she said, and many are over age 65 and rely on fixed incomes.

Cash knows of people who live in a 900-square-foot house, “and they saw their taxes triple in the past three years.” She attributes those increases to additional levied taxes on top of home valuations, which rose dramatically with inflation during the past few years. Houses that used to sell for $20,000 are now commanding several times that amount, she said.

And, Cash said, she knows several people who moved out of a paid-in-full home, partly because they couldn’t shoulder the tax burden; they relocated to government-subsidized housing.

In closing, the mayors said: Our residents deserve better than deficits, economic decline, and policies that push families and businesses away. We, as mayors, can only support our cities for so long before the heavy hand of state mandates and financial pressure demands more than our communities can provide.”

“Our state owes it to our citizens to practice responsible fiscal management and to stop taxing our families, seniors, and businesses out of Minnesota,” the mayors said. “We urge the Legislature to course-correct and to remember that every dollar you manage belongs not to the Capitol, but to the people of Minnesota.”

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 12:45

Intel Slides After Nvidia Halts Tests Of 18A Tech, White House Signals Chip Giant Not "Too Strategic To Fail"

After President Donald Trump publicly attacked Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan in August, writing, “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately,” Intel rushed to arrange a White House meeting that became a turning point for the struggling chipmaker which was on the verge of failure, Reuters wrote in a new report.

Tan, a veteran venture capitalist with a long history of investments in China, prepared for the meeting, seeking support from influential allies including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The roughly 40-minute Oval Office meeting included Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and focused on how Tan would stabilize and rebuild Intel at a moment when US semiconductor policy had become a central national priority.

During that meeting, Tan agreed to the proposal which was already reported and which saw the US government receive equity in Intel in exchange for additional CHIPS Act funding. The agreement delivered $5.7 billion in cash, made the U.S. government Intel’s largest shareholder, and conferred on the company what many investors now describe as a “too-strategic-to-fail” status.... although maybe not.

After the deal, Tan pledged to “make Intel great again,” which Lutnick posted under the caption, “The Art of the Deal: Intel.” The government’s involvement quickly helped "improve" Intel’s standing with potential partners and customers eager to align with the administration’s industrial strategy.

Sure enough, since Tan became CEO in March, but really since the deal with the Trump admin, Intel’s stock has climbed about 80%, far outpacing much of the broader market. The new momentum helped secure major investments, including $5 billion from Nvidia and $2 billion from SoftBank.

Technology lobbyist Adam Kovacevich called the government deal a “lifeline” for Intel, suggesting the company’s leadership and strategic direction might have been in jeopardy without it. At the same time, Tan began a sweeping internal restructuring, cutting roughly 15% of Intel’s workforce, flattening management layers, and pushing for faster, more engineering-driven decision-making across the organization.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, well, despite the optics little has changed.

As Reuters notes, despite the improved deal flow (or at least perception thereof) and the political backing (in exchange for a pound of flesh equity), Intel’s core manufacturing challenges remain and the Commerce Department appeared to make it clear that they are not a guaranteed priority, and in fact more dilutions for the benefit of taxpayers may be on deck. 

Intel is not "too strategic to fail" one official told Reuters refuting the prevailing market mantra which assumes the opposite, adding that "Secretary Lutnick talks to all parties rather than prioritizing calls for Intel’s sake."

And while the company claims that its advanced chip process is “progressing well,” there was more bad news - which apparently never rose to the level of 8K importance - after Nvidia recently tested Intel’s 18A manufacturing technology and chose not to proceed. Even after investing billions, Nvidia made no commitment to manufacture its chips at Intel, and Tan acknowledged the limited scope of the partnership, saying, “Right now we are focused on collaborations."

But now that the forced deal "honeymoon" period is over and the stock is once again drifting lower, Tan may want to consider focusing on delivering results because the goodwill that the CEO bought by going in bed with Trump is almost over.

In response to the Reuters report, INTC stock dropped as much as 4%, and down almost 20% from its recent high at the start of the month. It still has a long way to fall to the low $20 where it traded before the company announced its "tactical alignment" with the US government.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 12:25

Federal Judge Bars Trump Admin's Funding Cuts To Sanctuary States

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge in Rhode Island has blocked the Trump administration’s plan to divert Homeland Security funding from states that fail to assist with certain federal immigration efforts.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in El Paso, Texas, on Feb. 13, 2025. Justin Hamel/AFP via Getty Images

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy’s ruling on Monday sided with a coalition of 12 attorneys general that sued the administration this year after being informed that several states would receive reduced federal grants as a result of their sanctuary jurisdiction statuses.

The order affects funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had cut more than $233 million from Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. These funds are part of a $1 billion program tied to risk assessments and primarily go to local law enforcement and emergency services.

The group of a dozen attorneys general included those from California, Illinois, and New Jersey, who all wanted to participate in challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s policy.

In her 48-page ruling, McElroy ruled that the government’s funding decisions wrongly took into consideration states’ positions on immigration enforcement.

“What else could defendants’ decisions to cut funding to specific counterterrorism programming by conspicuous round numbered amounts—including by slashing off the millions-place digits of awarded sums—be if not arbitrary and capricious? Neither a law degree nor a degree in mathematics is required to deduce that no plausible, rational formula could produce this result,” McElroy wrote.

The judge then ordered DHS to reinstate the previously announced funding allocations to the plaintiff states.

“Defendants’ wanton abuse of their role in federal grant administration is particularly troublesome given the fact that they have been entrusted with a most solemn duty: safeguarding our nation and its citizens,” McElroy wrote. “While the intricacies of administrative law and the terms and conditions on federal grants may seem abstract to some, the funding at issue here supports vital counterterrorism and law enforcement programs.”

McElroy highlighted the recent Brown University attack, where a man killed two students and injured nine others, as an instance where the $1 billion federal program would be crucial in responding to such a tragedy.

“To hold hostage funding for programs like these based solely on what appear to be defendants’ political whims is unconscionable and, at least here, unlawful,” the Rhode Island-based judge stated in her ruling.

DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said the department will fight the order.

“This judicial sabotage threatens the safety of our states, counties, towns, and weakens the entire nation,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “We will fight to restore these critical reforms and protect American lives.”

The White House did not return a request for comment.

The lawsuit dates back to September, when 11 states and the District of Columbia took aim at the administration’s directive to slash funds to sanctuary areas, arguing it violated federal law and was meant to coerce compliance with immigration policies.

A federal judge permanently blocked DHS in October from withholding $34 million for New York City’s transportation security due to its sanctuary status, calling the action “arbitrary, capricious, and a blatant violation of the law.”

An August ruling barred funding blocks to 34 cities and counties over sanctuary policies, extending injunctions against immigration-related grant conditions.

In April, a judge blocked Trump’s broader defunding efforts against sanctuary cities such as San Francisco and Santa Clara, California, following suits against executive orders.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 12:05

Strong 7Y Treasury Sale Sends Yields To Session Low In Final 2025 Auction

After two poor, disappointing coupon auctions earlier this week, when global yields were surging thanks to the circus that is Japan, we have come to the final note auction of the year, and yes... this one was not quite as bad. 

The sale of $44BN in 7Y notes priced at a high yield of 3.930%, up from 3.781% in November and the highest since July. That said, the auction stopped through the 3.933% When Issued by 0.3bps, and followed 4 consecutive tailing auctions.

The bid to cover was 2.509, up from 2.459 last month and the highest since July, if just below the six-auction average of 2.520.

Unlike the week's previous coupon auctions, which saw a slide in foreign demand, the internals were stronger and Indirects took down 59.04%, up from 56.65% and the highest since August's 77.5%. And with Directs rising to 31.6%, just shy of a record high, Dealers were left with just 9.34%, the lowest since July.

Overall, this was a stronger auction than the subpar fare observed earlier this week, which is handy since this was also the final auction of the year, helping push yields down to session lows. Of course, we now have an entirely new year to look forward to and with an onslaught of deficit-funding debt on deck, far more ugly auctions on deck.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 11:57

Federal Judge Upholds New York's Driver's Licenses For Illegals

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed the Trump administration’s challenge to New York’s Green Light Law, upholding the state’s issuance of driver’s licenses to individuals without requiring proof of legal U.S. residency.

People line up at the New York State DMV in New York City on April 28, 2025. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

U.S. District Judge Anne M. Nardacci (Biden) in Albany determined that the Trump administration, which challenged the law under President Donald Trump’s enforcement of immigration laws, failed to back its claims that the state law usurps federal law or that it unlawfully regulates or unlawfully discriminates against the federal government.

The Justice Department filed the lawsuit against the state over the law in February, naming Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, as defendants.

“As I said from the start, our laws protect the rights of all New Yorkers and keep our communities safe,” James said in a statement on Dec. 19. “I will always stand up for New Yorkers and the rule of law.”

Nardacci stated that her job was not to evaluate the desirability of the Green Light Law as a policy matter. Rather, she said in a 23-page opinion, it was to assess whether the Trump administration’s arguments established that the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which grants federal laws precedence over state laws.

The administration, she wrote, has “failed to state such a claim.”

The Green Light Law was framed as improving public safety on the roads, as people without licenses sometimes drove without one or without having passed a road test. The state also makes it easier for holders of such licenses to get auto insurance in an attempt to minimize accidents involving uninsured drivers.

Under the law, people without a valid Social Security number can submit alternative forms of ID, such as valid passports and driver’s licenses issued in other countries. Applicants must still obtain a permit and pass a road test to qualify for a “standard driver’s license.” The program does not apply to commercial driver’s licenses.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit sought to strike down the law as “a frontal assault on the federal immigration laws, and the federal authorities that administer them.”

It noted a provision that requires the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner to notify people who are in the country illegally when a federal immigration agency has requested their information.

In 2020, during Trump’s first term, his administration sought to push New York into changing the law by preventing anyone from the state from enrolling in trusted traveler programs.

Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo offered to restore limited federal access to driving records, but stated he would not allow immigration agents to see lists of people who applied for the special licenses available to immigrants who couldn’t prove legal residency in the country. The administration restored New Yorkers’ access to the trusted traveler program after a short-lived legal battle.

In the lawsuit thrown out Tuesday, the administration contended that it would be simpler to enforce federal immigration priorities if federal authorities had unhindered access to New York’s driver data. Nardacci, agreeing with a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in a county clerk’s prior challenge to the law, stated that such information “remains available to federal immigration authorities” via a lawful court order or judicial warrant.

In December 2019, former ICE acting director Tom Homan, now Trump’s border Czar, called the law an “enticement” that minimizes the illegality of illegal immigration by providing benefits.

“There’s absolutely no reason to give a privilege of a driver’s license to someone who is here in violation of the law,” Homan stated.

In February 2020, a New York sheriff said the law hinders human trafficking investigations by restricting DMV data sharing with federal agents.

“So, if Border Patrol came and said, ‘Hey, we want to look through your records because we’re looking for this guy,’ I can’t share our investigation with them if it has DMV data,” Wayne County Sheriff Barry Virts said.

That same month, the Department of Homeland Security banned New Yorkers from enrolling in trusted traveler programs, with acting Secretary Chad Wolf citing the law’s barriers to DMV data access as the reason.

New York responded with a lawsuit, alleging the ban was punitive and harmed residents.

The Associated Press contributed to this report 

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 11:25

Holding Pattern: Coast Guard Awaits Special Forces Unit To Execute Venezuela-Linked Tanker Seizure

Update (1120ET):

U.S. Coast Guard forces remain in a holding pattern this week, awaiting the arrival of specialized teams to assist in the interdiction and seizure of the Venezuela-linked oil tanker Bella 1.

Reuters reports that the Coast Guard is awaiting one of two specialist units, known as Maritime Security Response Teams (MSRTs), which can board the tanker by rappelling from helicopters under hostile conditions.

MSRT units are called in for non-compliant vessels, hostile crews, or situations involving weapons, sanctions evasion, or national security threats. Regular Coast Guard boarding operations are not equipped to handle such situations.

Earlier this month, President Trump ordered a "blockade" of sanctioned oil shipments to disrupt Venezuela-Cuba-China flows, aiming to pressure and create instability in Caracas that would ultimately lead to further economic ruin across Cuba.

"There are limited teams who are trained for these types of boardings," Corey Ranslem, chief executive of maritime security group Dryad Global and previously with the U.S. Coast Guard, told Reuters.

The problem with a limited number of MSRT units is that it will complicate President Trump's gunboat diplomacy, as hundreds of dark tankers are operating to ensure 900,000 barrels per day of Venezuelan crude flows to Asia.

*   *   * 

President Trump's reposturing of the U.S. military forces toward the Western Hemisphere - effectively Monroe Doctrine 2.0 - reinforced this week by the deployment of additional special-operations aircraft, troops, and equipment into the Caribbean, as U.S. forces apply gunboat diplomacy against Venezuela to disrupt crude oil flows routed through Cuba and onward to China, a campaign that, if successful, could spark regime instability in Caracas, and amplify economic and political stress in Cuba as well.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that a "large number of special-operations aircraft, troops, and equipment" arrived in the Caribbean region early this week - a movement of military assets and personnel confirmed by U.S. officials and flight-tracking data.

According to the WSJ:

At least 10 CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, which are used by special-operations forces, flew into the region Monday night from Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, according to an official. C-17 cargo aircraft from Fort Stewart and Fort Campbell Army bases arrived Monday in Puerto Rico, according to flight-tracking data. A different U.S. official confirmed that military personnel and equipment were transported on planes.

It isn’t clear what types of troops and equipment the aircraft were transporting. Cannon is home to the 27th Special Operations Wing, while the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, an elite U.S. special operations unit, and the 101st Airborne Division are based at Fort Campbell. The first battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment is based at Hunter Army Airfield, at Fort Stewart.

The 27th Special Operations Wing and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment are trained to support high-risk infiltration and extraction missions and provide close air and combat support. Army Rangers are trained to seize airfields and provide security for specialized forces, such as SEAL Team Six or Delta Force, during a precise kill or capture mission.

In a separate report, defense and security media outlet Army Recognition, citing open-source intelligence accounts on X, indicated that the U.S. military is ramping up deployments of F-35A stealth fighter jets, intelligence aircraft, and electronic warfare platforms across the Caribbean.

David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an aerospace think tank, told WSJ that the "prepositioning forces" in the region are "to take action." He said the movement of such assets indicates that the administration has already decided on a course of action.

"The question that remains is to accomplish what?" Deptula said.

Trump's gunboat diplomacy - seizing two sanctioned tankers and targeting a third earlier this week - should be viewed as a pressure campaign to disrupt Venezuela-Cuba-China oil flows. It's always about following the money, and in this case, that oil money props up the Maduro regime.

Jorge Piñón, a Cuban exile who tracks the island's energy ties to Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin, told WSJ earlier this week that once crude oil flows are cut, this would act as a domino effect and create regime instability in Caracas, warning that "it would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it."

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.

"Venezuela has been remarkably effective at masking both origin and ownership of crude and therefore at evading financial and trade-related controls," Kpler analyst Dimitris Ampatzidis told Bloomberg. "That's why Washington has increasingly moved from purely financial measures to physical disruption."

The military buildup across the region and the use of gunboat diplomacy are clear signals of the U.S. intent to force regime change in Venezuela by disrupting Maduro's funding lifelines; China responded earlier this week, and Beijing is not pleased about crude oil disruptions.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 11:20

Tennessee Judge Postpones Abrego Garcia Trial Amid Claims Of Vindictive Prosecution

Authored by Melanie Sun via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge in Tennessee overseeing the criminal case involving El Salvador national and long-time Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia has canceled a trial date for the human smuggling case, pending a decision on whether to dismiss the case entirely over the defendant’s allegations of vindictive prosecution.

A trial date in the case had been set for Jan. 27, but U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw of Nashville, Tennessee, in a Dec. 23 filing ordered to change the proceedings to an evidentiary hearing for the government to make its case against the allegations at 9 a.m. on Jan. 28, 2026.

From the arguments and evidence made in the proceedings, which could span a few days, Crenshaw will determine whether the case will proceed to trial or be dismissed.

“The Court has already found that Abrego has made such a showing, entitling him to discovery and an evidentiary hearing on why the government is prosecuting him,” Crenshaw wrote in the order.

“Given this, the burden has shifted to the government to ’rebut [the presumption] ”with objective, on-the-record explanations“' for charging Abrego.”

The indictment in Tennessee against Abrego Garcia came in May, which the defense noted was after a judge in Maryland—overseeing a separate civil case that will determine whether the government can deport the defendant—ordered his return from a prison in El Salvador to Maryland.

Abrego Garcia was indicted by a grand jury and charged with conspiracy to transport aliens and unlawful transportation of illegal aliens.

The alleged crimes happened during a 2022 traffic stop by Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers, in which he is accused of having worked with co-conspirators to knowingly smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States.

However, an immigration judge in 2019 ordered that, while Abrego Garcia had entered the United States unlawfully in 2011, the government was not allowed to deport him to El Salvador over a credible fear of persecution by gangs in his home country.

While the order did not bar his removal to safe third countries, Abrego Garcia stayed in the United States with a deportation hold for El Salvador.

Despite this hold, the Trump administration did indeed deport Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s maximum security CECOT prison in March, which the administration later said was an “administrative error.” In April, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return.

In its appeal, the defense argues that the government only started pursuing charges against Abrego Garcia after his deportation to El Salvador made national headlines. He pleaded not guilty in June, and in August, he rejected a plea deal to be deported to Uganda.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers are attempting to have the case dismissed, arguing that the government is pursuing a vindictive and selective prosecution against their client for successfully fighting his removal to El Salvador in the other case.

The Department of Justice has denied the allegations and provided internal emails and an affidavit from acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Robert McGuire, who said he sought the indictment based on his belief that Abrego Garcia committed a federal crime.

“I received no direction from anyone at the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, or any other source on the question of whether to seek or not to seek an indictment in this case,” he said.

The Trump administration maintains that Abrego Garcia is an illegal immigrant who should face the law if found guilty of human smuggling.

Crenshaw said in a ruling on Oct. 3 that there was a “realistic likelihood that the prosecution against [Abrego Garcia] may be vindictive.” The ruling allowed for the defense to seek discovery and testimony from government officials about their decision to bring the charges.

However, Crenshaw said in the Dec. 23 order that the subpoenas requested by the defense for three high-ranking Justice Department officials—Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, acting Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General James McHenry, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh—will only be approved if the case is allowed to proceed to the next step.

The evidentiary hearing will focus on the government’s rebuttal of the defense’s motion to dismiss on grounds of vindictive prosecution.

The government has said it will call on testimony from Supervisory Special Agent John VanWie of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Baltimore, Special Agent Rana Saoud of HSI Nashville, and perhaps McGuire in the hearing.

In the Maryland case, the government continues pursuing the deportation of Abrego Garcia, now to Liberia.

Maryland Federal Judge Paula Xinis is overseeing that case. Xinis has expressed concern that the country to which Abrego Garcia is deported could eventually send him back to El Salvador. He has requested to be deported to Costa Rica, but the Trump administration is pursuing deportation to a list of countries in Africa.

“If the government were to say today, we’re going to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica,” a defense attorney told a court on Dec. 22, his client is prepared to go “as soon as this afternoon.”

Abrego Garcia remains out on bond in Maryland with his family after being released from the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, due to a temporary restraining order that prevents him from being taken into custody while Xinis considers the case.

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/24/2025 - 10:45