01/08 -- MN: ICE thug murders woman in Minneapolis; A Greenland suggestion
6 views
Skip to first unread message
Thomas L. Knapp
Jan 8, 2026, 6:14:12 AM (13 days ago) Jan 8
to Freedom News Daily
Freedom News Daily, 01/08/26
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Presented by the Liberty International
https://liberty-intl.org/
Produced by the staff of Rational Review News Digest
https://news.rationalreview.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Today's Freedom News:
1) MN: ICE thug murders woman in Minneapolis
2) US-regime-backed pirates steal two tankers
3) Bitcoin drops below $90,000 after early January pop as BTC ETFs see $480 million outflows
4) House Oversight panel subpoenas Les Wexner, others in Epstein investigation
5) Palestine: Israeli forces allegedly murder two in Gaza
6) Pope Leo convenes cardinals, signals reforms ahead now that the Holy Year is over
7) France: Judge warns US against meddling ahead of Le Pen appeal trial
8) Trump Says He Will Ban Wall Street Investment in Homes
9) Syria: Regime, Kurdish forces clash in Aleppo
10) Newspapers seek sanctions over allegations OpenAI deleted key evidence
11) US private employers add 41,000 jobs in December, missing estimate
12) Judge asks Lindsey Halligan why she’s still pretending to be US Attorney
13) Philippines evacuates 3,000 villagers after volcano activity raises alert level
14) China: Refiners expected to replace Venezuelan oil with Iranian crude, traders say
15) Yemen: Anti-Houthi council expels separatist leader and says he faces treason charges
16) Venezuela: Military buries soldiers slain in US operation to abduct Maduro
17) Aldrich Ames, 1941-2026
18) Burkina Faso: Junta says it foiled plot to kill Traoré
19) Senior Interior Department bureaucrat reportedly made millions from fast-tracked Nevada mine
20) Judge allows lawsuit against RFK Jr.’s Covid-19 vaccine policies to proceed
Today's Freedom Commentary:
21) A Greenland suggestion
22) “Gun culture” misleading propaganda
23) The Ugly Cold War Racket Against Cuba Rears Its Ugly Head Again
24) We Need to Get Off The Defensive About Immigration
25) How a Techno-Optimist Became a Grave Skeptic
26) Venezuela: It All Depends on the Meaning of the Word “Run”
27) The “Law Enforcement” Rationale for Invading Venezuela Is an Open-Ended License for War
28) Is Homeownership “White Supremacy?” NYC’s New Housing Czar Thinks So
29) Discernment that shatters online falsehoods
30) The W.E.B. Du Bois We Lost: Marginal Economist?
31) The spectacular failure of the Tim Walz Democrat
32) Exit Fudd
33) The US Is Acting Like a Rogue State in Venezuela
34) Defending Pop Music as Music
35) Who needs Congress? Might as well shut it down.
36) The Couto Mixto
37) Mamdani’s tenant advocate needs to be evicted from her job after showing hateful true colors
38) The Empire is Teetering! Why is There No General Strike?
39) Venezuela Regime Change: The Most Shocking Statements in Trump’s Most Shocking Press Conference
40) The US military is feeling invincible, and that’s dangerous
41) If Democrats Won’t Shut Down the Government, Trump Will
42) The “Psychedelic Renaissance” Continues
43) Will Venezuela Define the Second Trump Administration?
44) MAGA May Have Finally Entered the Death Phase Five Years After the Insurrection
45) Impeachment obsession returns as Democrats recycle lawfare to fire up their base
46) Three Cheers for Hilton Hotel Workers Who Banned ICE — Until Their Corporate Bosses Stomped Them Out
47) Just call it the “Trump Property Theory of Conflict Prevention”
48) The Fed’s Phantom Tradeoff
49) The Antidote to Fear is Courage
50) The Rorschach Regime Change Test
Today's Freedom Podcast and Video:
51) Reason Interview: Scott Jennings
52) Rising, 01/07/26
53) The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, 01/07/26
54) Underthrow Podcast, 01/07/26
55) The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent, 01/07/26
56) Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 01/07/26
57) Nonzero, 01/06/26
58) The Next Level, 01/06/26
59) Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock, 01/06/26
60) The Briefing Podcast with Michael Waldman, 01/06/26
vvvvv SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS vvvvv
THE CONSTITUTION OF NON-STATE GOVERNMENT: FIELD GUIDE TO TEXAS SECESSION, by TL Hulsey
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947660853
Tyranny Demands AN ACT OF SELF-DEFENSE: A NOVEL BY ERNE LEWIS
https://tinyurl.com/actofselfdefense
ONE IDENTITY FOR ALL YOUR CRYPTO
https://fioprotocol.io/
SAMUEL EDWARD KONKIN III REVOLUTIONARY FRIEND BY WENDY MCELROY
https://www.amazon.com/Samuel-Edward-Konkin-Revolutionary-Friend-ebook/dp/B0DP7B6127
TRY STARLINK: YOU GET A FREE MONTH AND SO DO WE!
https://starlink.com/residential?referral=RC-DF-8980236-19330-50
^^^^^ SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS ^^^^^
_____ Today's Freedom News _____
1) MN: ICE thug murders woman in Minneapolis
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“A US immigration [thug] has shot dead a 37-year-old woman in the city of Minneapolis, sparking protests overnight. Federal officials said the woman, Renee Nicole Good, had tried to run over immigration [thugs] with her car but the city mayor said the [thug] who shot her had acted recklessly. Videos of the incident show ICE [thugs] approaching a car which is in the middle of the street. As it attempts to drive off, one of them points his gun at the driver and at least two shots are heard. … Following the fatal shooting, the city’s Democratic mayor, Jacob Frey, used an expletive to urge the ICE [thugs] to leave the city.” (01/08/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jvnl4j1n4o
-----
2) US-regime-backed pirates steal two tankers
Source: Yahoo! News
“The United States says it has [stolen] two tankers linked to Venezuelan oil exports in ‘back-to-back’ operations in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean. US [pirates] boarded the Russian-flagged Marinera after a pursuit lasting almost two weeks and as it travelled through the waters between Iceland and Scotland. The British Navy gave logistical support by air and sea. A second tanker — the M/T Sophia — was accused by the US of ‘conducting illicit activities’ and boarded in the Caribbean.” (01/07/26)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-seizes-two-shadow-fleet-195507116.html
-----
3) Bitcoin drops below $90,000 after early January pop as BTC ETFs see $480 million outflows
Source: CoinDesk
“Bitcoin fell under $90,000 on Thursday as the early-January crypto rebound cooled, even as the broader risk backdrop stayed supportive with a rally in global government bonds and growing bets on Federal Reserve rate cuts. Bitcoin was down about 2% over 24 hours but still up more than 3% over the past week, while ether slipped around 3% on the day and remained roughly 6% higher over seven days, according to CoinGecko data.” (01/08/26)
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/01/08/bitcoin-ether-ease-after-early-january-pop-as-markets-price-fed-cuts
-----
4) House Oversight panel subpoenas Les Wexner, others in Epstein investigation
Source: WSYX 6 News
“A House Oversight panel on Wednesday approved subpoenas for Les Wexner and others in connection with the Epstein investigation. Les Wexner, billionaire founder of The Limited (now Bath & Body Works, Inc.) and longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein, will be subpoenaed along with Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, the executors of the Epstein estate, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced. … Wexner was named in a heavily redacted email sent from someone at the FBI’s New York office in 2019, with the subject line ‘Co-conspirators.’ The email was released as part of the DOJ’s document dump following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” (01/07/26)
https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/house-oversight-panel-subpoenas-les-wexner-others-jeffrey-epstein-columbus-ohio-new-albany-investigation
-----
5) Palestine: Israeli forces allegedly murder two in Gaza
Source: Times of Israel [Jerusalem]
“Two people have been killed and several others wounded in an Israeli strike on a home in Gaza City’s eastern Tuffah neighborhood a short while ago, according to Palestinian media. The dead are not immediately identified. Footage published by Palestinian media shows people wounded in the strike arriving at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, including an elderly woman in a bloodied headscarf and a young man lying on a stretcher. The IDF and Shin Bet said they targeted a ‘senior terrorist’ in the northern Gaza Strip this evening in response to shots fired toward IDF troops by Hamas operatives earlier.” (01/07/26)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/two-said-killed-others-wounded-in-israeli-strike-in-gaza-city/
-----
6) Pope Leo convenes cardinals, signals reforms ahead now that the Holy Year is over
Source: ABC News
“Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday opened a new phase of his pontificate by gathering the world’s cardinals to Rome and indicating some reform-minded priorities by calling the modernizing teachings of the Second Vatican Council the ‘guiding star’ of the church. Red-capped cardinals trickled into the Vatican’s audience hall for the opening session of the two-day meeting, the first of Leo’s papacy. Several cardinals said they didn’t know what to expect, since Leo’s written invitation had spoken only in vague terms about four main agenda items. … But during his morning general audience Wednesday, Leo gave the strongest signal yet about the direction of his still-young pontificate, calling for the full implementation of the reforms of Vatican II, the 1960s meetings that modernized and revolutionized the Catholic Church and remain a source of debate today.” (01/07/26)
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/pope-signals-reform-minded-priorities-pontificate-gears-128974584
-----
7) France: Judge warns US against meddling ahead of Le Pen appeal trial
Source: Politico
“A senior French judge warned Tuesday against ‘unacceptable’ foreign interference after the U.S. reportedly considered sanctioning members of France’s judiciary. ‘If such facts were true or were to materialize, they would constitute unacceptable and intolerable interference in our country’s internal affairs,’ Peimane Ghaleh-Marzban, president of the Paris court that handled a contentious case involving far-right chief Marine Le Pen, said in an inaugural speech to new magistrates, according to AFP. His comments come after German news outlet Der Spiegel reported that the U.S. State Department had considered imposing sanctions on the judges who sentenced Le Pen to a five-year election ban last spring over embezzlement of EU funds, preventing her from running in the presidential election planned for 2027. … Le Pen, who denies all charges, will face an appeal trial from next week, with a decision expected ahead of the summer.” (01/07/26)
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-judge-peimane-ghaleh-marzban-unacceptable-us-meddling-marine-le-pen-appeal-trial/
-----
8) Trump Says He Will Ban Wall Street Investment in Homes
Source: US News & World Report
“U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his administration is moving to ban Wall Street from investing in single-family homes in a bid to reduce home prices, a potential blow for private-equity landlords that also pressured homebuilder shares. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was taking immediate action and would ask Congress to codify the measure, adding he would also be discussing additional housing and affordability proposals in a speech at the Davos World Economic Forum. … Wall Street landlords dispute that their investments have stoked inflation and hurt housing supply. In a January research note, Blackstone said institutions own only 0.5% of all single-family homes in the United States. It was not immediately clear what legal authority Trump would draw upon to impose such a ban on the private market purchases of houses.” (01/07/26)
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2026-01-07/us-will-ban-large-institutional-investors-from-buying-single-family-homes-trump-says
-----
9) Syria: Regime, Kurdish forces clash in Aleppo
Source: NBC News
“The deadliest clashes so far broke out Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of the northern city of Aleppo, as efforts to merge the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces with the national army have shown little progress. Syria ’s state-run SANA news agency said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack by the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF. SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded by SDF shelling that hit its office. The SDF in a statement denied being behind the shelling that killed the civilians and said a shell launched by ‘factions affiliated with the Damascus government’ landed in the al-Midan neighborhood.” (01/07/25)
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/syria/syria-aleppo-government-forces-kurdish-fighters-clashes-rcna252741
-----
10) Newspapers seek sanctions over allegations OpenAI deleted key evidence
Source: San Diego Union-Tribune
“Lawyers representing the New York Daily News and an array of news organizations suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing [sic] and distorting their reporters’ work have asked a Manhattan judge to sanction ChatGPT’s parent company, alleging the tech behemoth deleted millions of conversations they were required to hand over as evidence of copyright infringement. OpenAI continued to destroy output logs despite orders from two judges to preserve and provide them to the news organizations, new court filings allege. More than 1 million logs that had been requested — containing information the news outlets believe was based on their journalists’ reporting — were subbed out, according to court documents.” (01/07/26)
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/01/07/ny-daily-news-other-papers-seek-sanctions-over-allegations-open-ai-deleted-key-evidence/
-----
11) US private employers add 41,000 jobs in December, missing estimate
Source: The Hill
“Private employers added 41,000 jobs in December, recovering from losses in the previous month but missing the projected estimate for gains by a few thousand jobs. Dow Jones estimated the private sector would add about 48,000 jobs in the final month of the year after losing 29,000 workers in November. Gains made were coupled with a 4.4 percent year-over-year pay increase for employees, according to ADP. The South and Northeast tracked the most growth, with 54,000 new jobs in the Southern region and 40,000 in the Northeast. The West was the only region to see a decrease in jobs, with 61,000 roles cut. The decrease reflects a broader decline in roles within the information, business services and manufacturing industries.” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/business/5676352-december-job-growth-recovery/
-----
12) Judge asks Lindsey Halligan why she’s still pretending to be US Attorney
Source: Independent [UK]
“A federal judge has demanded an explanation from prosecutor Lindsey Halligan for continuing to use the title of U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia despite another judge’s ruling that she was unlawfully occupying the role. District Judge David Novak, appointed by President Donald Trump, issued a three-page order Tuesday giving Halligan seven days to explain herself, given that District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie had found in November that the Department of Justice had violated the Constitution by appointing her as a second successive interim hire. Currie’s finding led to the dismissal of criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two long-standing enemies of the president.” (01/07/26)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-lindsey-halligan-judge-letter-b2895899.html
-----
13) Philippines evacuates 3,000 villagers after volcano activity raises alert level
Source: SFGate
“A series of mild eruptions at the most active volcano in the Philippines has prompted the evacuation of nearly 3,000 villagers from a danger zone on its foothills, officials said Wednesday. Authorities raised the 5-step alert around Mayon Volcano in the northeastern province of Albay to level 3 on Tuesday after detecting intermittent rockfalls, some as big as cars, from its peak crater in recent days along with deadly pyroclastic flows — a fast-moving avalanche of super-hot rock fragments, ash and gas. Alert level 5 would indicate that a major explosive eruption, often with violent ejections of ash and debris and widespread ashfall, is underway. ‘This is already an eruption, a quiet one, with lava accumulating up the peak and swelling the dome, which cracked in some parts and resulted in rockfalls, some as big as cars,’ Teresito Bacolcol, the country’s chief volcanologist, told The Associated Press.” (01/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/philippines-evacuates-3-000-villagers-after-21281083.php
-----
14) China: Refiners expected to replace Venezuelan oil with Iranian crude, traders say
Source: Reuters
“Chinese independent refiners are expected to switch to heavy crude from sources including Iran in coming months to replace Venezuelan shipments halted since the U.S. removed the country’s president, traders and analysts said. Caracas and Washington agreed to export up to $2 billion worth of Venezuelan crude to the United States, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro over the weekend. That arrangement is likely to curtail Venezuelan supply to China, analysts say, reducing a source of cheap oil for independent refiners known as teapots. The world’s biggest crude importer is a major buyer of discounted sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela.” (01/07/26)
https://archive.is/hs7ue
-----
15) Yemen: Anti-Houthi council expels separatist leader and says he faces treason charges
Source: ABC News
“A council fighting against Yemen’s Houthi rebels [sic] said Wednesday it had expelled the leader of a separatist movement and charged him with treason after he reportedly declined to travel to Saudi Arabia for talks. The statement carried by SABA news agency controlled by anti-Houthi forces is the latest escalation between Saudi-backed forces and the Southern Transitional Council, which had been backed by the United Arab Emirates. It also further complicates the future of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country riven by one of the Mideast’s worst conflicts for over a decade. The STC said leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi remained in Aden. It also accused Saudi Arabia of launched airstrikes in Yemen’s al-Dhale governorate, causing casualties.” (01/07/26)
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/yemen-anti-houthi-council-expels-separatist-leader-faces-128970987
-----
16) Venezuela: Military buries soldiers slain in US operation to abduct Maduro
Source: SFGate
“Venezuela’s military held a mass funeral in the country’s capital on Wednesday as it began to bury dozens of soldiers slain during the United States'[s] weekend operation to capture former President Nicolás Maduro. Men carried wooden caskets cloaked in the Venezuelan flag past rows of uniformed officers. Singing echoed out from a nearby church in Caracas and music from a military orchestra ceremony echoed over the cemetery, while throngs of family members and soldiers marched behind a row of caskets. As the caskets were lowered into the ground, gunfire from a military ceremony echoed out over the state-owned graveyard in a low-income neighborhood in the city’s south side. Earlier in the day, families cried and embraced next to the caskets during a wake. ” (01/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/venezuela-s-military-buries-soldiers-slain-in-us-21281884.php
-----
17) Aldrich Ames, 1941-2026
Source: United Press International
“Aldrich Ames, a former CIA agent who spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia, died in prison, according to prison records. He was 84 years old. The Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate records for Ames state he died Monday. … Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion charges in an eastern district of Virginia courtroom on April 24, 1994, and was given life in prison as part of the plea deal for violating the Espionage Act. He was arrested that February, along with his wife, Maria Rosario Ames, on charges that they had spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia since 1985, in exchange for $2.5 million.” (01/07/26)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/01/07/Aldrich-Ames-dies-prison/3541767763630/
-----
18) Burkina Faso: Junta says it foiled plot to kill Traoré
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“A plot to kill Burkina Faso’s military leader, Capt Ibrahim Traoré, has been thwarted, the West African nation has announced. The sophisticated plan had been hatched by Lt Col Paul Henri Damiba, the military officer ousted by Traoré in September 2022, the security minister said in a late-night broadcast. ‘Our intelligence services intercepted this operation in the final hours. They had planned to assassinate the head of state and then strike other key institutions, including civilian personalities,’ said Mahamadou Sana, further alleging that the plot had been funded from neighbouring Ivory Coast. There has been no comment from either Col Damiba or Ivory Coast. Since seizing power, Capt Traoré has faced at least two coup attempts and is also grappling with growing jihadist violence that has forced millions from their homes.” (01/07/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz4dzyq7po
-----
19) Senior Interior Department bureaucrat reportedly made millions from fast-tracked Nevada mine
Source: SFGate
“The husband of Karen Budd-Falen, a senior leader in the Department of the Interior, made millions of dollars from a Nevada mine that Budd-Falen’s agency approved, according to reporting by Public Domain and High Country News. As the associate deputy secretary, Budd-Falen is third in command at the department, which oversees the National Park Service. Her current role doesn’t require Senate confirmation. She also served in the Interior Department during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Her meetings and financial self-disclosure — or lack thereof — at the time are now coming under fire, after records showed that her family sold water rights necessary for a mining project without disclosing the hefty profit. Save Our Parks, an advocacy group for national parks, said that the ‘self-dealing goes beyond conflicts of interest into outright corruption’ in a news release.” (01/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/naked-corruption-interior-mine-deal-21279567.php
-----
20) Judge allows lawsuit against RFK Jr.’s Covid-19 vaccine policies to proceed
Source: South China Morning Post [Hong Kong]
“A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that several major medical organisations can move forward with their lawsuit challenging policies adopted under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr that they say will lower vaccination rates. US District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston rejected arguments by lawyers for US President Donald Trump’s administration that the groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, lack legal standing to pursue the case because they could not show they were harmed by the policies. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate all votes cast since June by a key vaccine advisory panel whose members were hand-picked by Kennedy, who previously founded the anti-vaccine [sic] group Children’s Health Defense before becoming the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services.” (01/06/26)
https://archive.is/YVclp
_____ Today's Freedom Commentary _____
21) A Greenland suggestion
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie
“Greenland has a population is about 57,000. A modest proposal is that they should hold a referendum to decide, not if they should become an American state, but to decide if they wish to become an American protectorate or territory. There are several of these, including the US Virgin Islands. The deal should be that if it goes through, every Greenlander would receive $1 million from the US, for a total cost of $57bn. This is chicken-feed to the US economy. … all of them would become millionaires. Investing this sum for a return of 5% would bring an annual income of $50,000 each, while retaining the capital sum to pass on to heirs and successors. It would be much more acceptable than threats, bluster, and talk of annexation.” (01/07/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/a-greenland-suggestion
-----
22) “Gun culture” misleading propaganda
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal
“Politically addled authoritarians prefer to blame guns and the people who aren’t the problem, rather than to confront the real issues. Once you see it, you realize it’s everywhere, and they do it every chance they get. This isn’t helpful, and it shows which side they are truly on. It isn’t your side. But what about the guns? Crime culture uses guns, too, but this doesn’t make them part of gun culture. Crime culture uses cars in their pursuit of evil far more often than they use firearms, but I wouldn’t be so ignorant or dishonest as to call a vehicular tragedy that happens during a crime a consequence of ‘car culture.’ Criminals also use phones, money, and certain dog breeds.” (01/07/26)
https://www.easternnewmexiconews.com/story/2026/01/07/voices/opinion-gun-culture-misleading-propaganda/232485.html
-----
23) The Ugly Cold War Racket Against Cuba Rears Its Ugly Head Again
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“American interventionists are besides themselves with glee over the deaths of 32 members of Cuba’s national-security establishment who were serving as part of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s security team during the U.S. national-security establishment’s violent abduction of Maduro. Their ecstasy demonstrates that the old Cold War mentality that held interventionists in its grip for some 45 years never went away, not even with the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, at least not insofar as Cuba is concerned. But the excitement among among these old Cold War dead-enders pails in significance to their ecstasy over the fact that Cuba is now in the throes of a grave economic crisis, one that threatens the Cuban people with death by starvation and illness.” (01/07/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/01/07/the-ugly-cold-war-racket-against-cuba-rears-its-ugly-head-again/
-----
24) We Need to Get Off The Defensive About Immigration
Source: Liberal Currents
by Toby Buckle
“Across the world, free societies are under assault from a resurgent fascism. Across the world, fears about immigration have been one of the main — arguably the main — weapon used. And across the world, there has been a timidity on the part of progressives [sic] about countering these arguments. … We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. … We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. Our pessimism is self-fullfiling. In any contact sport, you get hurt more by flinching from the tackle than you do from committing to it.” (01/07/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-get-off-the-defensive-about-immigration/
-----
25) How a Techno-Optimist Became a Grave Skeptic
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Roger Bate
“efore Covid, I would have described myself as a technological optimist. New technologies almost always arrive amid exaggerated fears. Railways were supposed to cause mental breakdowns, bicycles were thought to make women infertile or insane, and early electricity was blamed for everything from moral decay to physical collapse. Over time, these anxieties faded, societies adapted, and living standards rose. The pattern was familiar enough that artificial intelligence seemed likely to follow it: disruptive, sometimes misused, but ultimately manageable. The Covid years unsettled that confidence — not because technology failed, but because institutions did.” (01/07/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-a-techno-optimist-became-a-grave-skeptic/
-----
26) Venezuela: It All Depends on the Meaning of the Word “Run”
Source: Town Hall
by Byron York
“There have been two parts to the political world’s reaction to the American operation that deposed and captured Nicolas Maduro. The first part was to marvel at what Brit Hume called ‘the extraordinary level of skill, technology and daring’ on the part of American forces and leadership. Hume noted that the U.S. performance, when considered alongside the flawless attack on Iran’s nuclear program, sent to the world ‘precisely the opposite signal from that sent by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan’. The second reaction emerged after President Donald Trump’s press conference announcing the action. ‘We’re going to run [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,’ Trump said. ‘So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.'” (01/07/25)
https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2026/01/07/columnistsbyronyork20260106venezuela-it-all-depends-on-the-meaning-of-the-word-run-n2668974
-----
27) The “Law Enforcement” Rationale for Invading Venezuela Is an Open-Ended License for War
Source: Reason
by Jacob Sullum
“Venezuela is well rid of Nicolás Maduro, a corrupt, oppressive, and illegitimate leader who presided over that country’s continuing decline after succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013. And judging from what happened after the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. forces nabbed a similarly odious strongman who likewise faced a federal drug indictment, the courts will not stand in the way of Maduro’s prosecution. The ‘law enforcement’ rationale for Saturday’s attack on Venezuela is nevertheless both implausible and troubling. It offers an open-ended license for any president who wants to excise Congress from decisions about the use of military force, accelerating a trend that threatens to nullify its constitutional war powers.” (01/07/26)
https://reason.com/2026/01/07/the-law-enforcement-rationale-for-invading-venezuela-is-an-open-ended-license-for-war/
-----
28) Is Homeownership “White Supremacy?” NYC’s New Housing Czar Thinks So
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just appointed Cea Weaver to lead his new tenant protection office. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Weaver is the architect of New York’s aggressive ‘cancel rent’ movements. And it’s her past comments that are currently setting the internet on fire. In resurfaced posts, Weaver labeled private property — and specifically homeownership — as a ‘tool of white supremacy.’ She has since pulled her X account. As an American, I find her perspective not just radical, but dangerously racist and seriously flawed.” (01/07/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/is-homeownership-white-supremacy
-----
29) Discernment that shatters online falsehoods
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff
“The private lives of political leaders have long been fair game for opponents and investigative reporters – and, increasingly, amateur internet sleuths and online provocateurs. When the high-profile individuals are female, whether leaders themselves or their wives or partners, studies show that the scrutiny tends to be harsher and more speculative. ‘The scandalization and personalization of news is profitable,’ observed the Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab, a joint initiative between an American and a Dutch university. However, this trend not only ‘diminish[es] the public standing or credibility of the politician, but … also divert[s] attention from substantive policy discussions.’ Progressively powerful internet-enabled searching and sharing amplifies both facts and fictions, honest persuasion as well as embedded prejudices. This week, as the Monitor reports, a Paris court convicted 10 individuals of ‘degrading, insulting, and malicious’ cyberharassment of French first lady Brigitte Macron.” (01/06/25)
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2026/0106/Discernment-that-shatters-online-falsehoods
-----
30) The W.E.B. Du Bois We Lost: Marginal Economist?
Source: The Daily Economy
by Paul McDonnold
“W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left. … But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally ‘edgy’ subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.” (01/07/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-w-e-b-du-bois-we-lost-marginal-economist/
-----
31) The spectacular failure of the Tim Walz Democrat
Source: Washington Examiner
by W. James Antle III
“Before Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) became the first casualty of the burgeoning Minnesota day care fraud scandal, he was supposed to be the reason white men and working-class white people more generally might vote Democratic. Walz, who abandoned his gubernatorial reelection bid on Monday, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. He was billed as a dad’s dad, an affable football coach, a fixer of trucks who was not afraid to get his hands dirty under the hood. Instead, Walz was judged by many voters to be as ‘weird’ as he claimed Vice President JD Vance — then a freshman Ohio senator and junior partner on the 2024 Republican ticket — was. He, or at least his aides, bungled a basic football metaphor.” (01/07/25)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/state/4407834/spectacular-failure-tim-walz-democrat-minnesota-day-care-fraud/
-----
32) Exit Fudd
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds. … To the extent that [Tim] Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a ‘Fudd,’ meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.” (01/07/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/tim-walz-minnesota/
-----
33) The US Is Acting Like a Rogue State in Venezuela
Source: Common Dreams
by Joseph Bouchard
“After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a ‘Maximum Pressure Campaign’, the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife are standing trial for ‘narco-terrorism’ charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead. Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under ‘Popular Capitalism’, modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.” (01/07/25)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-rogue-state-venezuela
-----
34) Defending Pop Music as Music
Source: Law & Liberty
by David D Corey & Dominic MM Saunders
“In ‘Contemporary Muses,’ Henry T. Edmondson III is gently critical of those who defend the value of pop music on political grounds. Political protest may be a mainstay of pop music, but ‘it would be disappointing,’ he writes, ‘if America’s … cultural commentators were unable to see past the politics.’ Instead, Edmondson proposes to defend (certain) pop music as something that approaches philosophy: ‘Some pop songs explore deep themes of moral philosophy’ or ‘meditate thoughtfully on the human condition.’ Edmondson’s approach bears fruit as he catalogues lyrics that echo major themes of Western moral philosophy. One might wonder, however, whether defending pop music as philosophy is much different from defending it as political protest.” (01/07/26)
https://lawliberty.org/forum/defending-pop-music-as-music/
-----
35) Who needs Congress? Might as well shut it down.
Source: The Hill
by Bill Press
“Trump’s war against Venezuela is just the latest manifestation of his abuse of presidential power. In the last 11 months, he has flouted domestic law by firing tens of thousands of federal employees without cause, firing 17 inspectors general, firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents and tearing down the East Wing of the White House. … Trump also violated the War Powers Act of 1973, which limits a president’s ability to send troops into armed conflict without congressional approval. Like the rest of us, members of Congress only learned about the invasion of Venezuela and Maduro’s seizure after it happened. So what’s Congress going to do about it? Absolutely nothing, of course! And that’s the most disturbing news of all.” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5674080-venezuela-trump-regime-change/
-----
36) The Couto Mixto
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“It is a deeply rooted belief in the Western political tradition, from Thomas Hobbes to contemporary interventionist currents, that a successful political community requires a strong central authority capable of imposing rules and guaranteeing order. According to this view, in the absence of such authority, society would inevitably collapse into chaos. History, however, offers a particularly intriguing counterexample. For nearly seven centuries, the Couto Mixto, a small microterritory composed of the villages of Santiago de Rubiás, Rubiás, and Meaus, existed along the border between Portugal and Spain without a permanent sovereign or centralized governmental authority. Despite this absence of formal state power, it developed a stable social order grounded in voluntary self-government and an extensive regime of free trade.” (01/07/26)
https://fee.org/articles/the-couto-mixto/
-----
37) Mamdani’s tenant advocate needs to be evicted from her job after showing hateful true colors
Source: New York Post
by Kirsten Fleming
“It’s time to evict Cea Weaver from her new gig. Less than a week after Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed the radical-left tenant advocate to head up his Office to Protect Tenants, it’s clear that Weaver is not fit to work in city government. Besides being an avowed Communist and posting a social media call to ‘seize private property’ in 2018, the 37-year-old is also a woker-than-woke lady who clearly hates whitey — specifically, white men. According to Weaver, homeownership is a ‘weapon of white supremacy’. In a video from 2021 that’s making the rounds now, she says property should be transitioned ‘toward a model of shared equity’. She adds: ‘It will mean that families — especially white families, but some POC families — who are homeowners are, well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.'” (01/07/25)
https://nypost.com/2026/01/06/opinion/mamdanis-tenant-advocate-needs-to-be-evicted-from-her-job/
-----
38) The Empire is Teetering! Why is There No General Strike?
Source: CounterPunch
by Rich Gibson
“Going downhill, like a Slinky on a staircase, the empire rolls down almost imperceptibly, until it reaches the floor and collapses in on itself. But the empire isn’t a Slinky. It is busy with class and imperial warfare, the few attacking the many in ways more numerous than a short essay can outline. Where is the resistance? Where are the unions? Even conservative Catholic, David Brooks, has called for a general strike and mass civil disobedience. It only makes sense.” (01/07/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/07/the-empire-is-teetering-why-is-there-no-general-strike/
-----
39) Venezuela Regime Change: The Most Shocking Statements in Trump’s Most Shocking Press Conference
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Snider
“At 4:21 in the morning of January 3, U.S. President Donald Trump posted that ‘The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.’ No one had anticipated such a military operation prior to the announcement, and no one anticipated the comments Trump would make later that morning in his press conference. The press conference, and the comments that followed shortly after, contained several shocking statements.” (01/07/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2026/01/06/the-venezuelan-coup-the-most-shocking-statements-in-trumps-most-shocking-press-conference/
-----
40) The US military is feeling invincible, and that’s dangerous
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Dan Grazier & Benjamin Gedan
“During the first game of the season in the second-greatest baseball movie of all time, ‘Major League,’ the character Willie Mays Hayes makes a basket catch at center field. Upon returning to the dugout, his manager shakes the outfielder’s hand and tells him, ‘Nice catch Hayes, don’t ever f&%#ing do it again!’ (‘Bull Durham’ is No. 1.) In some way, the success of Operation Absolute Resolve makes the episode more dangerous than if the mission had failed. That is because success can lead to overconfidence — and costly mistakes. In the wake of a spectacular military operation involving a lot of fancy aircraft and special forces, it is easy to start believing that warfare is nothing more than the proper application of technology. But what happened in Venezuela is the exception, not the rule.” (01/07/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-venezuela-dangerous/
-----
41) If Democrats Won’t Shut Down the Government, Trump Will
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“We are just a few weeks away from another deadline on government funding, and all sides want you to know something: This will not go the way it did the last time. Nobody wants to see a replay of the longest shutdown in American history that happened last October and November. Democrats are not going to ask for an extension of Obamacare subsidies, which ran out on December 31, as a condition of passing appropriations. (There will be a House vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies on Thursday, but that’s happening outside of the government funding process.) Republicans are going to try to negotiate appropriations bills with Democrats, rather than a unilateral demand to extend current funding. The sting of that shutdown, the subsequent Republican wipeout in special elections, and the Democratic capitulation to end the impasse have made all sides wary of disrupting the flow of government funding.” (01/07/25)
https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/trump-government-shutdown-tanf-minnesota-congress/
-----
42) The “Psychedelic Renaissance” Continues
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Roman Gelperin
“In early 2024, Rick Doblin — the man whose work launched one of the biggest social and cultural movements of our time, ‘the Psychedelic Renaissance’ — was expecting to see the crowning achievement of his life’s mission. The non-profit he led and founded, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), had recently published the second of its Phase 3 clinical trials of the psychedelic drug MDMA, investigating its efficacy in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The results seemed incontestable. … And then, in August 2024, ‘the FDA decision was worse than any of us [had] anticipated,’ said Doblin. It outright rejected the New Drug Application for MDMA, demanding that MAPS conduct a third Phase 3 study to gather more information, a process that would require at least three more years.” (01/07/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-psychedelic-renaissance-continues
-----
43) Will Venezuela Define the Second Trump Administration?
Source: The American Conservative
by Justin Logan
“Presidents are drawn to foreign policy in part because courts and Congress won’t constrain them as they do on domestic policy. Presidential historians love ambitious foreign policies, and rank war presidents higher than peace presidents. So it’s understandable that presidents often look to make their legacies through foreign policy. In the postwar era, though, for every Reagan, there is an LBJ, a Bush, or a Carter. The lure of foreign policy is that it promises national greatness; the peril is that the foreigners get a vote, and things may be sketchier than people tell you. To use a Trumpian metaphor, what can seem like a clear shot to the fairway can wind up in thick rough.” (01/07/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/will-venezuela-define-the-second-trump-administration/
-----
44) MAGA May Have Finally Entered the Death Phase Five Years After the Insurrection
Source: The UnPopulist
by Gabriel Schoenfeld
“Opposite errors have appeared after each of Trump’s two presidential victories. Following his surprise win in 2016, many dismissed Trumpism as an anomaly — a cultural spasm that would fade — when we were actually embarking on a genuine political realignment. After 2024, perhaps the inverse mistake was made: many assumed his second presidential victory reflected MAGA’s enduring cultural resonance, when it may instead represent the final surge of an unstable ideological coalition that has already crested. If initially there was an underestimation of Trump’s ability to tap into deep cultural currents, now there may be an overestimation of his coalition’s capacity to outlast the man himself.” (01/06/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/maga-may-have-finally-entered-the
-----
45) Impeachment obsession returns as Democrats recycle lawfare to fire up their base
Source: Fox News
by Jonathan Turley
“‘Are You Not Entertained?’ With the country’s economy improving and other issues losing traction with the public, Democrats are increasingly turning to the one thing lacking in Washington: impeachment. As they work to take back the House in the midterms, Democrats are again promising voters the equivalent of the Roman Games by restarting impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. For many liberal voters, impeachment has become the thrilling cage match of lawfare. Facing a challenger on the left in New York, Rep. Dan Goldman [D-NY] was the latest to dangle impeachment before his constituents. He insisted that Trump can be removed for the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The same people who introduced what I called an abusive ‘snap impeachment’ against Trump are now suggesting that he can be impeached for an act that was previously upheld as lawful in the courts.” (01/07/25)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jonathan-turley-impeachment-obsession-returns-democrats-recycle-lawfare-fire-up-base
-----
46) Three Cheers for Hilton Hotel Workers Who Banned ICE — Until Their Corporate Bosses Stomped Them Out
Source: The Intercept
by Natasha Lennard
“‘NO ROOM AT THE INN!’ The U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted on its official X account on Monday. ‘HiltonHotels has launched a coordinated campaign in Minneapolis to REFUSE service to DHS law enforcement. When officers attempted to book rooms using official government emails and rates, Hilton Hotels maliciously CANCELLED their reservations.’ Leaving aside for a second the obscene comparison of gestapo-style immigration troops to Mary and Joseph searching for lodging in the Nativity story, the post made an extraordinary and unlikely claim: One of the largest hotel chains in the world was taking an organized stand against the Trump administration’s deportation machine. It was, like so many administration claims, a lie.” (01/06/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/06/hilton-ban-ice-minneapolis-workers/
-----
47) Just call it the “Trump Property Theory of Conflict Prevention”
Source: Washington Post
by Jim Geraghty
“Remember the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention? Way back in 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed, ‘No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.’ It was a little tongue in cheek, but the theory generally made sense: Once a country was sufficiently open to American culture to welcome the hamburger chain to its shores and was sufficiently plugged into the global economy, its interest in military aggression dropped significantly. … Alas, the Golden Arches Theory didn’t hold up for very long. … Perhaps it is time for a new theory to fit our dramatically different notion of who is an American ally and who is a potential foe. Consider that no two countries with a Trump-branded property have ever fought a war against each other — at least, not while they’ve had that Trump property.” (01/06/26)
https://archive.is/YOqxe
-----
48) The Fed’s Phantom Tradeoff
Source: Independent Institute
by Alexander William Salter
“Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve cut its interest-rate target by 25 basis points, or 0.25 percentage points, bringing the range down to 3.5–3.75 percent. This was no routine decision. It passed by a contentious 9–3 vote: two Federal Open Market Committee members wanted to hold the target rate steady, while Fed Governor Stephen Miran favored a larger 50-basis-point cut. Chairman Jerome Powell called it a ‘close call.’ What justified this controversial decision? According to the Fed’s official statement, policymakers judged that ‘downside risks to employment rose in recent months.’ The unemployment rate had ‘edged up’ to 4.4 percent through September, and job gains had slowed. But there’s an obvious problem: inflation remains above target.” (01/06/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/25/the-feds-phantom-tradeoff/
-----
49) The Antidote to Fear is Courage
Source: In These Times
Azadeh Shahshahani & Stephanie Guilloud
“A leaked Justice Department memo in early December outlined Attorney General Pam Bondi’s directive to the FBI to ’compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism’. In addition to establishing a ‘cash reward system’ for information, the memo, first published by journalist Ken Klippenstein, lays out targets that include those who express ‘opposition to law and immigration enforcement’, ’adherence to radical gender ideology’, ’anti-Christianity’, ’anti-capitalism’, and ’anti-Americanism’. These documents imply that the “terrorists” are the brave teachers, neighbors, librarians, and community members blowing whistles, protecting students, keeping books on shelves, advocating for trans rights, and organizing for economic and social equity. Bondi’s directive builds on President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum known as NSPM-7 which names anti-fascism as domestic terrorism.” (01/06/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/antidote-to-fear-is-courage-fascism-antifa-trump
-----
50) The Rorschach Regime Change Test
Source: The Bulwark
by Joe Perticone
“The American government has billed the dramatic capture and extradition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend as a law enforcement operation carried out with the support of the U.S. military. Now that Maduro is in custody, the United States intends to exert control of the country through (what the administration assumes will be) Maduro’s pliant vice president, whose primary task is to open up Venezuela’s nationalized oil production to American corporations. That’s the administration’s high-level story, at least. But as more context comes out, it gets less clear whether Maduro’s capture was a law enforcement action, a military operation, or some secret third thing.” (01/06/26)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/nicolas-maduro-venezuela-republican-senators-law-enforcement-operation-military-judiciary-committee
_____ Today's Freedom Podcast and Video _____
51) Reason Interview: Scott Jennings
Source: Reason
“The Conservative Movement’s Identity Crisis.” (01/07/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/01/07/cnns-scott-jennings-the-conservative-movements-identity-crisis/
-----
52) Rising, 01/07/26
Source: The Hill
“This Zohran Mamdani official wants to seize property from whites?” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/hilltv/5672531-rising-january-7-2025/
-----
53) The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, 01/07/26
Source: The Dispatch
“Free Bird | Interview: Matt Ridley.” (01/07/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/remnant/free-bird-interview-matt-ridley/
-----
54) Underthrow Podcast, 01/07/26
Source: Underthrow
“Applying Great Thinkers: Hayek, Boyd, and McCluhan w/ Mark McGrath and Brian Rivera (Part Two).” (01/07/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjbcnY9CeTE
-----
55) The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent, 01/07/26
Source: The New Republic
“Trump’s Vile Attack on Mark Kelly Backfires as Harsh Retort Goes Viral.” (01/07/26)
https://newrepublic.com/article/204999/trump-vile-attack-mark-kelly-backfires-harsh-retort-goes-viral
-----
56) Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 01/07/26
Source: Antiwar.com
“US Walks Back Maduro Cartel Claim, Witkoff: Progress Made on Ukraine Security Guarantees, More.” (01/07/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKuBISQRd9o
-----
57) Nonzero, 01/06/26
Source: bloggingheads.tv
“NASA’s Plans for the Moon and Mars | Robert Wright & Joel Achenbach.” (01/06/26)
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/69213
-----
58) The Next Level, 01/06/26
Source: The Bulwark
“Trump Doesn’t Have a Strategy. He’s Just Dumb.” (01/06/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a83tMzt5qtw
-----
59) Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock, 01/06/26
Source: Freedom’s Phoenix
“Chace Barber (President and Founder of Edison Motors) provides an update on their diesel electric trucks, their vision for a sustainable, right-to-repair future, and the future of their mission.” (01/06/26)
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Media/389440-2026-01-06-2026-01-06-ernest-hancock-interview-chace-barber-edison-motors.htm
-----
60) The Briefing Podcast with Michael Waldman, 01/06/26
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
“An Emergency in Venezuela.” (01/06/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8gn-ZSbLNM
----------------------------------------------------------------------
FND is published every weekday except on holidays. Forward freely.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit:
http://groups.google.com/group/freedom-news-daily
Support the Liberty International (tax deductible)
https://liberty-intl.org/join-the-movement/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Presented by the Liberty International
https://liberty-intl.org/
Produced by the staff of Rational Review News Digest
https://news.rationalreview.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Today's Freedom News:
1) MN: ICE thug murders woman in Minneapolis
2) US-regime-backed pirates steal two tankers
3) Bitcoin drops below $90,000 after early January pop as BTC ETFs see $480 million outflows
4) House Oversight panel subpoenas Les Wexner, others in Epstein investigation
5) Palestine: Israeli forces allegedly murder two in Gaza
6) Pope Leo convenes cardinals, signals reforms ahead now that the Holy Year is over
7) France: Judge warns US against meddling ahead of Le Pen appeal trial
8) Trump Says He Will Ban Wall Street Investment in Homes
9) Syria: Regime, Kurdish forces clash in Aleppo
10) Newspapers seek sanctions over allegations OpenAI deleted key evidence
11) US private employers add 41,000 jobs in December, missing estimate
12) Judge asks Lindsey Halligan why she’s still pretending to be US Attorney
13) Philippines evacuates 3,000 villagers after volcano activity raises alert level
14) China: Refiners expected to replace Venezuelan oil with Iranian crude, traders say
15) Yemen: Anti-Houthi council expels separatist leader and says he faces treason charges
16) Venezuela: Military buries soldiers slain in US operation to abduct Maduro
17) Aldrich Ames, 1941-2026
18) Burkina Faso: Junta says it foiled plot to kill Traoré
19) Senior Interior Department bureaucrat reportedly made millions from fast-tracked Nevada mine
20) Judge allows lawsuit against RFK Jr.’s Covid-19 vaccine policies to proceed
Today's Freedom Commentary:
21) A Greenland suggestion
22) “Gun culture” misleading propaganda
23) The Ugly Cold War Racket Against Cuba Rears Its Ugly Head Again
24) We Need to Get Off The Defensive About Immigration
25) How a Techno-Optimist Became a Grave Skeptic
26) Venezuela: It All Depends on the Meaning of the Word “Run”
27) The “Law Enforcement” Rationale for Invading Venezuela Is an Open-Ended License for War
28) Is Homeownership “White Supremacy?” NYC’s New Housing Czar Thinks So
29) Discernment that shatters online falsehoods
30) The W.E.B. Du Bois We Lost: Marginal Economist?
31) The spectacular failure of the Tim Walz Democrat
32) Exit Fudd
33) The US Is Acting Like a Rogue State in Venezuela
34) Defending Pop Music as Music
35) Who needs Congress? Might as well shut it down.
36) The Couto Mixto
37) Mamdani’s tenant advocate needs to be evicted from her job after showing hateful true colors
38) The Empire is Teetering! Why is There No General Strike?
39) Venezuela Regime Change: The Most Shocking Statements in Trump’s Most Shocking Press Conference
40) The US military is feeling invincible, and that’s dangerous
41) If Democrats Won’t Shut Down the Government, Trump Will
42) The “Psychedelic Renaissance” Continues
43) Will Venezuela Define the Second Trump Administration?
44) MAGA May Have Finally Entered the Death Phase Five Years After the Insurrection
45) Impeachment obsession returns as Democrats recycle lawfare to fire up their base
46) Three Cheers for Hilton Hotel Workers Who Banned ICE — Until Their Corporate Bosses Stomped Them Out
47) Just call it the “Trump Property Theory of Conflict Prevention”
48) The Fed’s Phantom Tradeoff
49) The Antidote to Fear is Courage
50) The Rorschach Regime Change Test
Today's Freedom Podcast and Video:
51) Reason Interview: Scott Jennings
52) Rising, 01/07/26
53) The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, 01/07/26
54) Underthrow Podcast, 01/07/26
55) The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent, 01/07/26
56) Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 01/07/26
57) Nonzero, 01/06/26
58) The Next Level, 01/06/26
59) Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock, 01/06/26
60) The Briefing Podcast with Michael Waldman, 01/06/26
vvvvv SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS vvvvv
THE CONSTITUTION OF NON-STATE GOVERNMENT: FIELD GUIDE TO TEXAS SECESSION, by TL Hulsey
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947660853
Tyranny Demands AN ACT OF SELF-DEFENSE: A NOVEL BY ERNE LEWIS
https://tinyurl.com/actofselfdefense
ONE IDENTITY FOR ALL YOUR CRYPTO
https://fioprotocol.io/
SAMUEL EDWARD KONKIN III REVOLUTIONARY FRIEND BY WENDY MCELROY
https://www.amazon.com/Samuel-Edward-Konkin-Revolutionary-Friend-ebook/dp/B0DP7B6127
TRY STARLINK: YOU GET A FREE MONTH AND SO DO WE!
https://starlink.com/residential?referral=RC-DF-8980236-19330-50
^^^^^ SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS ^^^^^
_____ Today's Freedom News _____
1) MN: ICE thug murders woman in Minneapolis
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“A US immigration [thug] has shot dead a 37-year-old woman in the city of Minneapolis, sparking protests overnight. Federal officials said the woman, Renee Nicole Good, had tried to run over immigration [thugs] with her car but the city mayor said the [thug] who shot her had acted recklessly. Videos of the incident show ICE [thugs] approaching a car which is in the middle of the street. As it attempts to drive off, one of them points his gun at the driver and at least two shots are heard. … Following the fatal shooting, the city’s Democratic mayor, Jacob Frey, used an expletive to urge the ICE [thugs] to leave the city.” (01/08/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jvnl4j1n4o
-----
2) US-regime-backed pirates steal two tankers
Source: Yahoo! News
“The United States says it has [stolen] two tankers linked to Venezuelan oil exports in ‘back-to-back’ operations in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean. US [pirates] boarded the Russian-flagged Marinera after a pursuit lasting almost two weeks and as it travelled through the waters between Iceland and Scotland. The British Navy gave logistical support by air and sea. A second tanker — the M/T Sophia — was accused by the US of ‘conducting illicit activities’ and boarded in the Caribbean.” (01/07/26)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-seizes-two-shadow-fleet-195507116.html
-----
3) Bitcoin drops below $90,000 after early January pop as BTC ETFs see $480 million outflows
Source: CoinDesk
“Bitcoin fell under $90,000 on Thursday as the early-January crypto rebound cooled, even as the broader risk backdrop stayed supportive with a rally in global government bonds and growing bets on Federal Reserve rate cuts. Bitcoin was down about 2% over 24 hours but still up more than 3% over the past week, while ether slipped around 3% on the day and remained roughly 6% higher over seven days, according to CoinGecko data.” (01/08/26)
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/01/08/bitcoin-ether-ease-after-early-january-pop-as-markets-price-fed-cuts
-----
4) House Oversight panel subpoenas Les Wexner, others in Epstein investigation
Source: WSYX 6 News
“A House Oversight panel on Wednesday approved subpoenas for Les Wexner and others in connection with the Epstein investigation. Les Wexner, billionaire founder of The Limited (now Bath & Body Works, Inc.) and longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein, will be subpoenaed along with Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, the executors of the Epstein estate, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced. … Wexner was named in a heavily redacted email sent from someone at the FBI’s New York office in 2019, with the subject line ‘Co-conspirators.’ The email was released as part of the DOJ’s document dump following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” (01/07/26)
https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/house-oversight-panel-subpoenas-les-wexner-others-jeffrey-epstein-columbus-ohio-new-albany-investigation
-----
5) Palestine: Israeli forces allegedly murder two in Gaza
Source: Times of Israel [Jerusalem]
“Two people have been killed and several others wounded in an Israeli strike on a home in Gaza City’s eastern Tuffah neighborhood a short while ago, according to Palestinian media. The dead are not immediately identified. Footage published by Palestinian media shows people wounded in the strike arriving at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, including an elderly woman in a bloodied headscarf and a young man lying on a stretcher. The IDF and Shin Bet said they targeted a ‘senior terrorist’ in the northern Gaza Strip this evening in response to shots fired toward IDF troops by Hamas operatives earlier.” (01/07/26)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/two-said-killed-others-wounded-in-israeli-strike-in-gaza-city/
-----
6) Pope Leo convenes cardinals, signals reforms ahead now that the Holy Year is over
Source: ABC News
“Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday opened a new phase of his pontificate by gathering the world’s cardinals to Rome and indicating some reform-minded priorities by calling the modernizing teachings of the Second Vatican Council the ‘guiding star’ of the church. Red-capped cardinals trickled into the Vatican’s audience hall for the opening session of the two-day meeting, the first of Leo’s papacy. Several cardinals said they didn’t know what to expect, since Leo’s written invitation had spoken only in vague terms about four main agenda items. … But during his morning general audience Wednesday, Leo gave the strongest signal yet about the direction of his still-young pontificate, calling for the full implementation of the reforms of Vatican II, the 1960s meetings that modernized and revolutionized the Catholic Church and remain a source of debate today.” (01/07/26)
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/pope-signals-reform-minded-priorities-pontificate-gears-128974584
-----
7) France: Judge warns US against meddling ahead of Le Pen appeal trial
Source: Politico
“A senior French judge warned Tuesday against ‘unacceptable’ foreign interference after the U.S. reportedly considered sanctioning members of France’s judiciary. ‘If such facts were true or were to materialize, they would constitute unacceptable and intolerable interference in our country’s internal affairs,’ Peimane Ghaleh-Marzban, president of the Paris court that handled a contentious case involving far-right chief Marine Le Pen, said in an inaugural speech to new magistrates, according to AFP. His comments come after German news outlet Der Spiegel reported that the U.S. State Department had considered imposing sanctions on the judges who sentenced Le Pen to a five-year election ban last spring over embezzlement of EU funds, preventing her from running in the presidential election planned for 2027. … Le Pen, who denies all charges, will face an appeal trial from next week, with a decision expected ahead of the summer.” (01/07/26)
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-judge-peimane-ghaleh-marzban-unacceptable-us-meddling-marine-le-pen-appeal-trial/
-----
8) Trump Says He Will Ban Wall Street Investment in Homes
Source: US News & World Report
“U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his administration is moving to ban Wall Street from investing in single-family homes in a bid to reduce home prices, a potential blow for private-equity landlords that also pressured homebuilder shares. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was taking immediate action and would ask Congress to codify the measure, adding he would also be discussing additional housing and affordability proposals in a speech at the Davos World Economic Forum. … Wall Street landlords dispute that their investments have stoked inflation and hurt housing supply. In a January research note, Blackstone said institutions own only 0.5% of all single-family homes in the United States. It was not immediately clear what legal authority Trump would draw upon to impose such a ban on the private market purchases of houses.” (01/07/26)
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2026-01-07/us-will-ban-large-institutional-investors-from-buying-single-family-homes-trump-says
-----
9) Syria: Regime, Kurdish forces clash in Aleppo
Source: NBC News
“The deadliest clashes so far broke out Tuesday between Syrian government forces and Kurdish fighters in a contested area of the northern city of Aleppo, as efforts to merge the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces with the national army have shown little progress. Syria ’s state-run SANA news agency said a soldier was killed and three others were wounded in an attack by the SDF. State TV later reported that three civilians, including two women, were killed and others were wounded, including two children, in shelling of a residential area that it blamed on the SDF. SANA also said nine Aleppo Directorate of Agriculture employees were wounded by SDF shelling that hit its office. The SDF in a statement denied being behind the shelling that killed the civilians and said a shell launched by ‘factions affiliated with the Damascus government’ landed in the al-Midan neighborhood.” (01/07/25)
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/syria/syria-aleppo-government-forces-kurdish-fighters-clashes-rcna252741
-----
10) Newspapers seek sanctions over allegations OpenAI deleted key evidence
Source: San Diego Union-Tribune
“Lawyers representing the New York Daily News and an array of news organizations suing OpenAI for allegedly stealing [sic] and distorting their reporters’ work have asked a Manhattan judge to sanction ChatGPT’s parent company, alleging the tech behemoth deleted millions of conversations they were required to hand over as evidence of copyright infringement. OpenAI continued to destroy output logs despite orders from two judges to preserve and provide them to the news organizations, new court filings allege. More than 1 million logs that had been requested — containing information the news outlets believe was based on their journalists’ reporting — were subbed out, according to court documents.” (01/07/26)
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/01/07/ny-daily-news-other-papers-seek-sanctions-over-allegations-open-ai-deleted-key-evidence/
-----
11) US private employers add 41,000 jobs in December, missing estimate
Source: The Hill
“Private employers added 41,000 jobs in December, recovering from losses in the previous month but missing the projected estimate for gains by a few thousand jobs. Dow Jones estimated the private sector would add about 48,000 jobs in the final month of the year after losing 29,000 workers in November. Gains made were coupled with a 4.4 percent year-over-year pay increase for employees, according to ADP. The South and Northeast tracked the most growth, with 54,000 new jobs in the Southern region and 40,000 in the Northeast. The West was the only region to see a decrease in jobs, with 61,000 roles cut. The decrease reflects a broader decline in roles within the information, business services and manufacturing industries.” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/business/5676352-december-job-growth-recovery/
-----
12) Judge asks Lindsey Halligan why she’s still pretending to be US Attorney
Source: Independent [UK]
“A federal judge has demanded an explanation from prosecutor Lindsey Halligan for continuing to use the title of U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia despite another judge’s ruling that she was unlawfully occupying the role. District Judge David Novak, appointed by President Donald Trump, issued a three-page order Tuesday giving Halligan seven days to explain herself, given that District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie had found in November that the Department of Justice had violated the Constitution by appointing her as a second successive interim hire. Currie’s finding led to the dismissal of criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two long-standing enemies of the president.” (01/07/26)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-lindsey-halligan-judge-letter-b2895899.html
-----
13) Philippines evacuates 3,000 villagers after volcano activity raises alert level
Source: SFGate
“A series of mild eruptions at the most active volcano in the Philippines has prompted the evacuation of nearly 3,000 villagers from a danger zone on its foothills, officials said Wednesday. Authorities raised the 5-step alert around Mayon Volcano in the northeastern province of Albay to level 3 on Tuesday after detecting intermittent rockfalls, some as big as cars, from its peak crater in recent days along with deadly pyroclastic flows — a fast-moving avalanche of super-hot rock fragments, ash and gas. Alert level 5 would indicate that a major explosive eruption, often with violent ejections of ash and debris and widespread ashfall, is underway. ‘This is already an eruption, a quiet one, with lava accumulating up the peak and swelling the dome, which cracked in some parts and resulted in rockfalls, some as big as cars,’ Teresito Bacolcol, the country’s chief volcanologist, told The Associated Press.” (01/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/philippines-evacuates-3-000-villagers-after-21281083.php
-----
14) China: Refiners expected to replace Venezuelan oil with Iranian crude, traders say
Source: Reuters
“Chinese independent refiners are expected to switch to heavy crude from sources including Iran in coming months to replace Venezuelan shipments halted since the U.S. removed the country’s president, traders and analysts said. Caracas and Washington agreed to export up to $2 billion worth of Venezuelan crude to the United States, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro over the weekend. That arrangement is likely to curtail Venezuelan supply to China, analysts say, reducing a source of cheap oil for independent refiners known as teapots. The world’s biggest crude importer is a major buyer of discounted sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela.” (01/07/26)
https://archive.is/hs7ue
-----
15) Yemen: Anti-Houthi council expels separatist leader and says he faces treason charges
Source: ABC News
“A council fighting against Yemen’s Houthi rebels [sic] said Wednesday it had expelled the leader of a separatist movement and charged him with treason after he reportedly declined to travel to Saudi Arabia for talks. The statement carried by SABA news agency controlled by anti-Houthi forces is the latest escalation between Saudi-backed forces and the Southern Transitional Council, which had been backed by the United Arab Emirates. It also further complicates the future of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country riven by one of the Mideast’s worst conflicts for over a decade. The STC said leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi remained in Aden. It also accused Saudi Arabia of launched airstrikes in Yemen’s al-Dhale governorate, causing casualties.” (01/07/26)
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/yemen-anti-houthi-council-expels-separatist-leader-faces-128970987
-----
16) Venezuela: Military buries soldiers slain in US operation to abduct Maduro
Source: SFGate
“Venezuela’s military held a mass funeral in the country’s capital on Wednesday as it began to bury dozens of soldiers slain during the United States'[s] weekend operation to capture former President Nicolás Maduro. Men carried wooden caskets cloaked in the Venezuelan flag past rows of uniformed officers. Singing echoed out from a nearby church in Caracas and music from a military orchestra ceremony echoed over the cemetery, while throngs of family members and soldiers marched behind a row of caskets. As the caskets were lowered into the ground, gunfire from a military ceremony echoed out over the state-owned graveyard in a low-income neighborhood in the city’s south side. Earlier in the day, families cried and embraced next to the caskets during a wake. ” (01/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/venezuela-s-military-buries-soldiers-slain-in-us-21281884.php
-----
17) Aldrich Ames, 1941-2026
Source: United Press International
“Aldrich Ames, a former CIA agent who spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia, died in prison, according to prison records. He was 84 years old. The Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate records for Ames state he died Monday. … Ames pleaded guilty to espionage and tax evasion charges in an eastern district of Virginia courtroom on April 24, 1994, and was given life in prison as part of the plea deal for violating the Espionage Act. He was arrested that February, along with his wife, Maria Rosario Ames, on charges that they had spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia since 1985, in exchange for $2.5 million.” (01/07/26)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/01/07/Aldrich-Ames-dies-prison/3541767763630/
-----
18) Burkina Faso: Junta says it foiled plot to kill Traoré
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“A plot to kill Burkina Faso’s military leader, Capt Ibrahim Traoré, has been thwarted, the West African nation has announced. The sophisticated plan had been hatched by Lt Col Paul Henri Damiba, the military officer ousted by Traoré in September 2022, the security minister said in a late-night broadcast. ‘Our intelligence services intercepted this operation in the final hours. They had planned to assassinate the head of state and then strike other key institutions, including civilian personalities,’ said Mahamadou Sana, further alleging that the plot had been funded from neighbouring Ivory Coast. There has been no comment from either Col Damiba or Ivory Coast. Since seizing power, Capt Traoré has faced at least two coup attempts and is also grappling with growing jihadist violence that has forced millions from their homes.” (01/07/26)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz4dzyq7po
-----
19) Senior Interior Department bureaucrat reportedly made millions from fast-tracked Nevada mine
Source: SFGate
“The husband of Karen Budd-Falen, a senior leader in the Department of the Interior, made millions of dollars from a Nevada mine that Budd-Falen’s agency approved, according to reporting by Public Domain and High Country News. As the associate deputy secretary, Budd-Falen is third in command at the department, which oversees the National Park Service. Her current role doesn’t require Senate confirmation. She also served in the Interior Department during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Her meetings and financial self-disclosure — or lack thereof — at the time are now coming under fire, after records showed that her family sold water rights necessary for a mining project without disclosing the hefty profit. Save Our Parks, an advocacy group for national parks, said that the ‘self-dealing goes beyond conflicts of interest into outright corruption’ in a news release.” (01/07/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/national-parks/article/naked-corruption-interior-mine-deal-21279567.php
-----
20) Judge allows lawsuit against RFK Jr.’s Covid-19 vaccine policies to proceed
Source: South China Morning Post [Hong Kong]
“A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that several major medical organisations can move forward with their lawsuit challenging policies adopted under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr that they say will lower vaccination rates. US District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston rejected arguments by lawyers for US President Donald Trump’s administration that the groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, lack legal standing to pursue the case because they could not show they were harmed by the policies. The lawsuit seeks to invalidate all votes cast since June by a key vaccine advisory panel whose members were hand-picked by Kennedy, who previously founded the anti-vaccine [sic] group Children’s Health Defense before becoming the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services.” (01/06/26)
https://archive.is/YVclp
_____ Today's Freedom Commentary _____
21) A Greenland suggestion
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Madsen Pirie
“Greenland has a population is about 57,000. A modest proposal is that they should hold a referendum to decide, not if they should become an American state, but to decide if they wish to become an American protectorate or territory. There are several of these, including the US Virgin Islands. The deal should be that if it goes through, every Greenlander would receive $1 million from the US, for a total cost of $57bn. This is chicken-feed to the US economy. … all of them would become millionaires. Investing this sum for a return of 5% would bring an annual income of $50,000 each, while retaining the capital sum to pass on to heirs and successors. It would be much more acceptable than threats, bluster, and talk of annexation.” (01/07/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/a-greenland-suggestion
-----
22) “Gun culture” misleading propaganda
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal
“Politically addled authoritarians prefer to blame guns and the people who aren’t the problem, rather than to confront the real issues. Once you see it, you realize it’s everywhere, and they do it every chance they get. This isn’t helpful, and it shows which side they are truly on. It isn’t your side. But what about the guns? Crime culture uses guns, too, but this doesn’t make them part of gun culture. Crime culture uses cars in their pursuit of evil far more often than they use firearms, but I wouldn’t be so ignorant or dishonest as to call a vehicular tragedy that happens during a crime a consequence of ‘car culture.’ Criminals also use phones, money, and certain dog breeds.” (01/07/26)
https://www.easternnewmexiconews.com/story/2026/01/07/voices/opinion-gun-culture-misleading-propaganda/232485.html
-----
23) The Ugly Cold War Racket Against Cuba Rears Its Ugly Head Again
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“American interventionists are besides themselves with glee over the deaths of 32 members of Cuba’s national-security establishment who were serving as part of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s security team during the U.S. national-security establishment’s violent abduction of Maduro. Their ecstasy demonstrates that the old Cold War mentality that held interventionists in its grip for some 45 years never went away, not even with the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, at least not insofar as Cuba is concerned. But the excitement among among these old Cold War dead-enders pails in significance to their ecstasy over the fact that Cuba is now in the throes of a grave economic crisis, one that threatens the Cuban people with death by starvation and illness.” (01/07/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/01/07/the-ugly-cold-war-racket-against-cuba-rears-its-ugly-head-again/
-----
24) We Need to Get Off The Defensive About Immigration
Source: Liberal Currents
by Toby Buckle
“Across the world, free societies are under assault from a resurgent fascism. Across the world, fears about immigration have been one of the main — arguably the main — weapon used. And across the world, there has been a timidity on the part of progressives [sic] about countering these arguments. … We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. … We are locked into a battle we did not seek and our timidity is keeping us on the defensive. It isn’t working. Our pessimism is self-fullfiling. In any contact sport, you get hurt more by flinching from the tackle than you do from committing to it.” (01/07/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-get-off-the-defensive-about-immigration/
-----
25) How a Techno-Optimist Became a Grave Skeptic
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Roger Bate
“efore Covid, I would have described myself as a technological optimist. New technologies almost always arrive amid exaggerated fears. Railways were supposed to cause mental breakdowns, bicycles were thought to make women infertile or insane, and early electricity was blamed for everything from moral decay to physical collapse. Over time, these anxieties faded, societies adapted, and living standards rose. The pattern was familiar enough that artificial intelligence seemed likely to follow it: disruptive, sometimes misused, but ultimately manageable. The Covid years unsettled that confidence — not because technology failed, but because institutions did.” (01/07/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/how-a-techno-optimist-became-a-grave-skeptic/
-----
26) Venezuela: It All Depends on the Meaning of the Word “Run”
Source: Town Hall
by Byron York
“There have been two parts to the political world’s reaction to the American operation that deposed and captured Nicolas Maduro. The first part was to marvel at what Brit Hume called ‘the extraordinary level of skill, technology and daring’ on the part of American forces and leadership. Hume noted that the U.S. performance, when considered alongside the flawless attack on Iran’s nuclear program, sent to the world ‘precisely the opposite signal from that sent by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan’. The second reaction emerged after President Donald Trump’s press conference announcing the action. ‘We’re going to run [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,’ Trump said. ‘So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.'” (01/07/25)
https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2026/01/07/columnistsbyronyork20260106venezuela-it-all-depends-on-the-meaning-of-the-word-run-n2668974
-----
27) The “Law Enforcement” Rationale for Invading Venezuela Is an Open-Ended License for War
Source: Reason
by Jacob Sullum
“Venezuela is well rid of Nicolás Maduro, a corrupt, oppressive, and illegitimate leader who presided over that country’s continuing decline after succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013. And judging from what happened after the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. forces nabbed a similarly odious strongman who likewise faced a federal drug indictment, the courts will not stand in the way of Maduro’s prosecution. The ‘law enforcement’ rationale for Saturday’s attack on Venezuela is nevertheless both implausible and troubling. It offers an open-ended license for any president who wants to excise Congress from decisions about the use of military force, accelerating a trend that threatens to nullify its constitutional war powers.” (01/07/26)
https://reason.com/2026/01/07/the-law-enforcement-rationale-for-invading-venezuela-is-an-open-ended-license-for-war/
-----
28) Is Homeownership “White Supremacy?” NYC’s New Housing Czar Thinks So
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just appointed Cea Weaver to lead his new tenant protection office. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Weaver is the architect of New York’s aggressive ‘cancel rent’ movements. And it’s her past comments that are currently setting the internet on fire. In resurfaced posts, Weaver labeled private property — and specifically homeownership — as a ‘tool of white supremacy.’ She has since pulled her X account. As an American, I find her perspective not just radical, but dangerously racist and seriously flawed.” (01/07/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/is-homeownership-white-supremacy
-----
29) Discernment that shatters online falsehoods
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff
“The private lives of political leaders have long been fair game for opponents and investigative reporters – and, increasingly, amateur internet sleuths and online provocateurs. When the high-profile individuals are female, whether leaders themselves or their wives or partners, studies show that the scrutiny tends to be harsher and more speculative. ‘The scandalization and personalization of news is profitable,’ observed the Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab, a joint initiative between an American and a Dutch university. However, this trend not only ‘diminish[es] the public standing or credibility of the politician, but … also divert[s] attention from substantive policy discussions.’ Progressively powerful internet-enabled searching and sharing amplifies both facts and fictions, honest persuasion as well as embedded prejudices. This week, as the Monitor reports, a Paris court convicted 10 individuals of ‘degrading, insulting, and malicious’ cyberharassment of French first lady Brigitte Macron.” (01/06/25)
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2026/0106/Discernment-that-shatters-online-falsehoods
-----
30) The W.E.B. Du Bois We Lost: Marginal Economist?
Source: The Daily Economy
by Paul McDonnold
“W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left. … But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally ‘edgy’ subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.” (01/07/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-w-e-b-du-bois-we-lost-marginal-economist/
-----
31) The spectacular failure of the Tim Walz Democrat
Source: Washington Examiner
by W. James Antle III
“Before Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) became the first casualty of the burgeoning Minnesota day care fraud scandal, he was supposed to be the reason white men and working-class white people more generally might vote Democratic. Walz, who abandoned his gubernatorial reelection bid on Monday, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. He was billed as a dad’s dad, an affable football coach, a fixer of trucks who was not afraid to get his hands dirty under the hood. Instead, Walz was judged by many voters to be as ‘weird’ as he claimed Vice President JD Vance — then a freshman Ohio senator and junior partner on the 2024 Republican ticket — was. He, or at least his aides, bungled a basic football metaphor.” (01/07/25)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/state/4407834/spectacular-failure-tim-walz-democrat-minnesota-day-care-fraud/
-----
32) Exit Fudd
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson
“A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds. … To the extent that [Tim] Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a ‘Fudd,’ meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.” (01/07/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/tim-walz-minnesota/
-----
33) The US Is Acting Like a Rogue State in Venezuela
Source: Common Dreams
by Joseph Bouchard
“After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a ‘Maximum Pressure Campaign’, the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife are standing trial for ‘narco-terrorism’ charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead. Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under ‘Popular Capitalism’, modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.” (01/07/25)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-rogue-state-venezuela
-----
34) Defending Pop Music as Music
Source: Law & Liberty
by David D Corey & Dominic MM Saunders
“In ‘Contemporary Muses,’ Henry T. Edmondson III is gently critical of those who defend the value of pop music on political grounds. Political protest may be a mainstay of pop music, but ‘it would be disappointing,’ he writes, ‘if America’s … cultural commentators were unable to see past the politics.’ Instead, Edmondson proposes to defend (certain) pop music as something that approaches philosophy: ‘Some pop songs explore deep themes of moral philosophy’ or ‘meditate thoughtfully on the human condition.’ Edmondson’s approach bears fruit as he catalogues lyrics that echo major themes of Western moral philosophy. One might wonder, however, whether defending pop music as philosophy is much different from defending it as political protest.” (01/07/26)
https://lawliberty.org/forum/defending-pop-music-as-music/
-----
35) Who needs Congress? Might as well shut it down.
Source: The Hill
by Bill Press
“Trump’s war against Venezuela is just the latest manifestation of his abuse of presidential power. In the last 11 months, he has flouted domestic law by firing tens of thousands of federal employees without cause, firing 17 inspectors general, firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents and tearing down the East Wing of the White House. … Trump also violated the War Powers Act of 1973, which limits a president’s ability to send troops into armed conflict without congressional approval. Like the rest of us, members of Congress only learned about the invasion of Venezuela and Maduro’s seizure after it happened. So what’s Congress going to do about it? Absolutely nothing, of course! And that’s the most disturbing news of all.” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5674080-venezuela-trump-regime-change/
-----
36) The Couto Mixto
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes
“It is a deeply rooted belief in the Western political tradition, from Thomas Hobbes to contemporary interventionist currents, that a successful political community requires a strong central authority capable of imposing rules and guaranteeing order. According to this view, in the absence of such authority, society would inevitably collapse into chaos. History, however, offers a particularly intriguing counterexample. For nearly seven centuries, the Couto Mixto, a small microterritory composed of the villages of Santiago de Rubiás, Rubiás, and Meaus, existed along the border between Portugal and Spain without a permanent sovereign or centralized governmental authority. Despite this absence of formal state power, it developed a stable social order grounded in voluntary self-government and an extensive regime of free trade.” (01/07/26)
https://fee.org/articles/the-couto-mixto/
-----
37) Mamdani’s tenant advocate needs to be evicted from her job after showing hateful true colors
Source: New York Post
by Kirsten Fleming
“It’s time to evict Cea Weaver from her new gig. Less than a week after Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed the radical-left tenant advocate to head up his Office to Protect Tenants, it’s clear that Weaver is not fit to work in city government. Besides being an avowed Communist and posting a social media call to ‘seize private property’ in 2018, the 37-year-old is also a woker-than-woke lady who clearly hates whitey — specifically, white men. According to Weaver, homeownership is a ‘weapon of white supremacy’. In a video from 2021 that’s making the rounds now, she says property should be transitioned ‘toward a model of shared equity’. She adds: ‘It will mean that families — especially white families, but some POC families — who are homeowners are, well, are gonna have a different relationship to property than the one we currently have.'” (01/07/25)
https://nypost.com/2026/01/06/opinion/mamdanis-tenant-advocate-needs-to-be-evicted-from-her-job/
-----
38) The Empire is Teetering! Why is There No General Strike?
Source: CounterPunch
by Rich Gibson
“Going downhill, like a Slinky on a staircase, the empire rolls down almost imperceptibly, until it reaches the floor and collapses in on itself. But the empire isn’t a Slinky. It is busy with class and imperial warfare, the few attacking the many in ways more numerous than a short essay can outline. Where is the resistance? Where are the unions? Even conservative Catholic, David Brooks, has called for a general strike and mass civil disobedience. It only makes sense.” (01/07/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/07/the-empire-is-teetering-why-is-there-no-general-strike/
-----
39) Venezuela Regime Change: The Most Shocking Statements in Trump’s Most Shocking Press Conference
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Snider
“At 4:21 in the morning of January 3, U.S. President Donald Trump posted that ‘The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country.’ No one had anticipated such a military operation prior to the announcement, and no one anticipated the comments Trump would make later that morning in his press conference. The press conference, and the comments that followed shortly after, contained several shocking statements.” (01/07/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2026/01/06/the-venezuelan-coup-the-most-shocking-statements-in-trumps-most-shocking-press-conference/
-----
40) The US military is feeling invincible, and that’s dangerous
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Dan Grazier & Benjamin Gedan
“During the first game of the season in the second-greatest baseball movie of all time, ‘Major League,’ the character Willie Mays Hayes makes a basket catch at center field. Upon returning to the dugout, his manager shakes the outfielder’s hand and tells him, ‘Nice catch Hayes, don’t ever f&%#ing do it again!’ (‘Bull Durham’ is No. 1.) In some way, the success of Operation Absolute Resolve makes the episode more dangerous than if the mission had failed. That is because success can lead to overconfidence — and costly mistakes. In the wake of a spectacular military operation involving a lot of fancy aircraft and special forces, it is easy to start believing that warfare is nothing more than the proper application of technology. But what happened in Venezuela is the exception, not the rule.” (01/07/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-venezuela-dangerous/
-----
41) If Democrats Won’t Shut Down the Government, Trump Will
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“We are just a few weeks away from another deadline on government funding, and all sides want you to know something: This will not go the way it did the last time. Nobody wants to see a replay of the longest shutdown in American history that happened last October and November. Democrats are not going to ask for an extension of Obamacare subsidies, which ran out on December 31, as a condition of passing appropriations. (There will be a House vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies on Thursday, but that’s happening outside of the government funding process.) Republicans are going to try to negotiate appropriations bills with Democrats, rather than a unilateral demand to extend current funding. The sting of that shutdown, the subsequent Republican wipeout in special elections, and the Democratic capitulation to end the impasse have made all sides wary of disrupting the flow of government funding.” (01/07/25)
https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/trump-government-shutdown-tanf-minnesota-congress/
-----
42) The “Psychedelic Renaissance” Continues
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Roman Gelperin
“In early 2024, Rick Doblin — the man whose work launched one of the biggest social and cultural movements of our time, ‘the Psychedelic Renaissance’ — was expecting to see the crowning achievement of his life’s mission. The non-profit he led and founded, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), had recently published the second of its Phase 3 clinical trials of the psychedelic drug MDMA, investigating its efficacy in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The results seemed incontestable. … And then, in August 2024, ‘the FDA decision was worse than any of us [had] anticipated,’ said Doblin. It outright rejected the New Drug Application for MDMA, demanding that MAPS conduct a third Phase 3 study to gather more information, a process that would require at least three more years.” (01/07/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-psychedelic-renaissance-continues
-----
43) Will Venezuela Define the Second Trump Administration?
Source: The American Conservative
by Justin Logan
“Presidents are drawn to foreign policy in part because courts and Congress won’t constrain them as they do on domestic policy. Presidential historians love ambitious foreign policies, and rank war presidents higher than peace presidents. So it’s understandable that presidents often look to make their legacies through foreign policy. In the postwar era, though, for every Reagan, there is an LBJ, a Bush, or a Carter. The lure of foreign policy is that it promises national greatness; the peril is that the foreigners get a vote, and things may be sketchier than people tell you. To use a Trumpian metaphor, what can seem like a clear shot to the fairway can wind up in thick rough.” (01/07/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/will-venezuela-define-the-second-trump-administration/
-----
44) MAGA May Have Finally Entered the Death Phase Five Years After the Insurrection
Source: The UnPopulist
by Gabriel Schoenfeld
“Opposite errors have appeared after each of Trump’s two presidential victories. Following his surprise win in 2016, many dismissed Trumpism as an anomaly — a cultural spasm that would fade — when we were actually embarking on a genuine political realignment. After 2024, perhaps the inverse mistake was made: many assumed his second presidential victory reflected MAGA’s enduring cultural resonance, when it may instead represent the final surge of an unstable ideological coalition that has already crested. If initially there was an underestimation of Trump’s ability to tap into deep cultural currents, now there may be an overestimation of his coalition’s capacity to outlast the man himself.” (01/06/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/maga-may-have-finally-entered-the
-----
45) Impeachment obsession returns as Democrats recycle lawfare to fire up their base
Source: Fox News
by Jonathan Turley
“‘Are You Not Entertained?’ With the country’s economy improving and other issues losing traction with the public, Democrats are increasingly turning to the one thing lacking in Washington: impeachment. As they work to take back the House in the midterms, Democrats are again promising voters the equivalent of the Roman Games by restarting impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. For many liberal voters, impeachment has become the thrilling cage match of lawfare. Facing a challenger on the left in New York, Rep. Dan Goldman [D-NY] was the latest to dangle impeachment before his constituents. He insisted that Trump can be removed for the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The same people who introduced what I called an abusive ‘snap impeachment’ against Trump are now suggesting that he can be impeached for an act that was previously upheld as lawful in the courts.” (01/07/25)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jonathan-turley-impeachment-obsession-returns-democrats-recycle-lawfare-fire-up-base
-----
46) Three Cheers for Hilton Hotel Workers Who Banned ICE — Until Their Corporate Bosses Stomped Them Out
Source: The Intercept
by Natasha Lennard
“‘NO ROOM AT THE INN!’ The U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted on its official X account on Monday. ‘HiltonHotels has launched a coordinated campaign in Minneapolis to REFUSE service to DHS law enforcement. When officers attempted to book rooms using official government emails and rates, Hilton Hotels maliciously CANCELLED their reservations.’ Leaving aside for a second the obscene comparison of gestapo-style immigration troops to Mary and Joseph searching for lodging in the Nativity story, the post made an extraordinary and unlikely claim: One of the largest hotel chains in the world was taking an organized stand against the Trump administration’s deportation machine. It was, like so many administration claims, a lie.” (01/06/26)
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/06/hilton-ban-ice-minneapolis-workers/
-----
47) Just call it the “Trump Property Theory of Conflict Prevention”
Source: Washington Post
by Jim Geraghty
“Remember the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention? Way back in 1996, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed, ‘No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.’ It was a little tongue in cheek, but the theory generally made sense: Once a country was sufficiently open to American culture to welcome the hamburger chain to its shores and was sufficiently plugged into the global economy, its interest in military aggression dropped significantly. … Alas, the Golden Arches Theory didn’t hold up for very long. … Perhaps it is time for a new theory to fit our dramatically different notion of who is an American ally and who is a potential foe. Consider that no two countries with a Trump-branded property have ever fought a war against each other — at least, not while they’ve had that Trump property.” (01/06/26)
https://archive.is/YOqxe
-----
48) The Fed’s Phantom Tradeoff
Source: Independent Institute
by Alexander William Salter
“Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve cut its interest-rate target by 25 basis points, or 0.25 percentage points, bringing the range down to 3.5–3.75 percent. This was no routine decision. It passed by a contentious 9–3 vote: two Federal Open Market Committee members wanted to hold the target rate steady, while Fed Governor Stephen Miran favored a larger 50-basis-point cut. Chairman Jerome Powell called it a ‘close call.’ What justified this controversial decision? According to the Fed’s official statement, policymakers judged that ‘downside risks to employment rose in recent months.’ The unemployment rate had ‘edged up’ to 4.4 percent through September, and job gains had slowed. But there’s an obvious problem: inflation remains above target.” (01/06/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/25/the-feds-phantom-tradeoff/
-----
49) The Antidote to Fear is Courage
Source: In These Times
Azadeh Shahshahani & Stephanie Guilloud
“A leaked Justice Department memo in early December outlined Attorney General Pam Bondi’s directive to the FBI to ’compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism’. In addition to establishing a ‘cash reward system’ for information, the memo, first published by journalist Ken Klippenstein, lays out targets that include those who express ‘opposition to law and immigration enforcement’, ’adherence to radical gender ideology’, ’anti-Christianity’, ’anti-capitalism’, and ’anti-Americanism’. These documents imply that the “terrorists” are the brave teachers, neighbors, librarians, and community members blowing whistles, protecting students, keeping books on shelves, advocating for trans rights, and organizing for economic and social equity. Bondi’s directive builds on President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum known as NSPM-7 which names anti-fascism as domestic terrorism.” (01/06/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/antidote-to-fear-is-courage-fascism-antifa-trump
-----
50) The Rorschach Regime Change Test
Source: The Bulwark
by Joe Perticone
“The American government has billed the dramatic capture and extradition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend as a law enforcement operation carried out with the support of the U.S. military. Now that Maduro is in custody, the United States intends to exert control of the country through (what the administration assumes will be) Maduro’s pliant vice president, whose primary task is to open up Venezuela’s nationalized oil production to American corporations. That’s the administration’s high-level story, at least. But as more context comes out, it gets less clear whether Maduro’s capture was a law enforcement action, a military operation, or some secret third thing.” (01/06/26)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/nicolas-maduro-venezuela-republican-senators-law-enforcement-operation-military-judiciary-committee
_____ Today's Freedom Podcast and Video _____
51) Reason Interview: Scott Jennings
Source: Reason
“The Conservative Movement’s Identity Crisis.” (01/07/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/01/07/cnns-scott-jennings-the-conservative-movements-identity-crisis/
-----
52) Rising, 01/07/26
Source: The Hill
“This Zohran Mamdani official wants to seize property from whites?” (01/07/26)
https://thehill.com/hilltv/5672531-rising-january-7-2025/
-----
53) The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, 01/07/26
Source: The Dispatch
“Free Bird | Interview: Matt Ridley.” (01/07/26)
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/remnant/free-bird-interview-matt-ridley/
-----
54) Underthrow Podcast, 01/07/26
Source: Underthrow
“Applying Great Thinkers: Hayek, Boyd, and McCluhan w/ Mark McGrath and Brian Rivera (Part Two).” (01/07/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjbcnY9CeTE
-----
55) The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent, 01/07/26
Source: The New Republic
“Trump’s Vile Attack on Mark Kelly Backfires as Harsh Retort Goes Viral.” (01/07/26)
https://newrepublic.com/article/204999/trump-vile-attack-mark-kelly-backfires-harsh-retort-goes-viral
-----
56) Antiwar News with Dave DeCamp, 01/07/26
Source: Antiwar.com
“US Walks Back Maduro Cartel Claim, Witkoff: Progress Made on Ukraine Security Guarantees, More.” (01/07/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKuBISQRd9o
-----
57) Nonzero, 01/06/26
Source: bloggingheads.tv
“NASA’s Plans for the Moon and Mars | Robert Wright & Joel Achenbach.” (01/06/26)
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/69213
-----
58) The Next Level, 01/06/26
Source: The Bulwark
“Trump Doesn’t Have a Strategy. He’s Just Dumb.” (01/06/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a83tMzt5qtw
-----
59) Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock, 01/06/26
Source: Freedom’s Phoenix
“Chace Barber (President and Founder of Edison Motors) provides an update on their diesel electric trucks, their vision for a sustainable, right-to-repair future, and the future of their mission.” (01/06/26)
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Media/389440-2026-01-06-2026-01-06-ernest-hancock-interview-chace-barber-edison-motors.htm
-----
60) The Briefing Podcast with Michael Waldman, 01/06/26
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
“An Emergency in Venezuela.” (01/06/26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8gn-ZSbLNM
----------------------------------------------------------------------
FND is published every weekday except on holidays. Forward freely.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit:
http://groups.google.com/group/freedom-news-daily
Support the Liberty International (tax deductible)
https://liberty-intl.org/join-the-movement/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages