AFTER MAXING OUT OUR CREDIT CARDS FOR MONTHS, SOMETHING HAD TO GIVE: Retail sales fell 0.6% in November as consumers feel the pressure from inflation.

THE STRANGE ATTACK ON BLIND REVIEWING OF ACADEMIC PAPERS. In my years at FIRE, one thing I learned is that the best way to judge what academic institutions of any sort are up to is to determine what they would do if they were the moustache-twirling villain caricatures right-wingers think they are, and assume they are doing that. (With the important modification that, while it happens less often, they’re happy to steamroll left-leaning dissenters as well.)

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Federal Government Reminds Arizonans Why We Hate It. “I have spent all of my life living closer to the Mexican border than most people who make United States immigration law, the majority of it here in my native Arizona. The reason I led with that is because I wanted to establish my perspective cred.”

THEY HATE ANY EFFECTIVE OPPOSITION: The media’s deranged obsession with Ron DeSantis — even before he declares for 2024.

It’s poised to be a long two years for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Fresh off a nearly 20-point re-election win, and not yet having even announced his intention to run for president in 2024, DeSantis has become media enemy No. 1.

Take the case of Rebekah Jones, a pretend whistleblower who alleged with zero evidence that Florida was hiding its true COVID death rate. This week, in a deal with prosecutors, she admitted illegally accessing a state computer. She’d been a media darling because of her attacks on DeSantis.

On her website, Jones helpfully compiled a list of credulous media outlets that ran her false claims without checking. CNN, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Yahoo News, The Miami Herald and so on all fell for her lies, some many times over.

Much is made of Republicans choosing poor-quality candidates but Jones was most recently the Democratic nominee for Congress from Florida’s 1st Congressional District. She lost, thankfully, but that was just weeks before her guilty plea.

Have any of the media outlets repented? Apologized? Of course not. Stopping a potential DeSantis presidential candidacy is their first priority and admitting they were had, or complicit, in Jones’ lies would be a setback.

The Miami Herald, unable to give up its solidarity with Jones, this week even ran an incorrect headline alleging, “Charges against former state health department worker dismissed after she admits guilt.” The admission of guilt is just one of the six special conditions Jones will have to meet, including paying a hefty $20,000 fine and attending therapy, before those charges get dropped in two years.

For over two years, the media held up Jones as evidence DeSantis hadn’t managed the pandemic as successfully as it seemed. Now they should admit DeSantis was right and the pro-lockdown blue-state governors they so love were wrong.

They should do a lot of things, many of them anatomically impossible.

Flashback: Ron DeSantis has emerged as America’s awesome ‘shadow president.’

SICK: Ukrainian orphan girl denied life-saving surgery because she’s unvaxxed.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: The Daily Beast ponders: Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups.

(Link safe; goes to Ace of Spades.)

MICHAEL BARONE: Are the Silicon Valley fraudsters today’s robber barons?

Are these Silicon Valley scammers the second coming of the robber barons? Maybe, but you should remember that the so-called robber barons were christened and criticized by turn-of-the-century muckrakers with axes to grind and twentieth-century Marxists who regarded all capitalists as criminals.

While some business titans of yore profited from frauds, most benefited society by transforming great technological advances — the greatest ever, tech historian Vaclav Smil argues in his book, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact — into workable industrial processes producing goods and services of near-universal benefit.

Andrew Carnegie’s steel built civil and transportation infrastructure. John D. Rockefeller’s kerosene saved the whales, and his gasoline fueled the auto revolution. J. P. Morgan’s financing created the industrial might that Alan Greenspan would later hyperbolically claim won World War II.

They didn’t amass fortunes by robbing people. And indeed, they gave back, too. Carnegie’s libraries helped educate generations; Rockefeller created modern research hospitals; Morgan set an example of fine arts connoisseurship. Silicon Valley’s billionaires have yet to match these examples.

The “Robber Barons” gave us steel, railroads, electricity, etc. This generation gave us Facebook, and a bunch of even worse products. We should be so lucky as to have robber barons again.

LUDDITE TEENS: The Only Thing Better Than A Flip Phone Is No Phone At All. “The kids — and the NYT? — seem to find it adventuresome and quirky to go to the park and to read. Those seem like perfectly ordinary things to do, but maybe young people these days are so bonded to living through screens that it’s a huge accomplishment — a breaking free — to put the phone down.”

But other kids are angry. Apparently if you want to put your phone away, that’s “classist.”

SPACE: SpaceX launches NASA’s water topography satellite into orbit.

LAST NIGHT, ELON SETTLED ALL FAMILY BUSINESS: Twitter bans journalists including Aaron Rupar and Keith Olbermann.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Oregon’s Governor’s Last Act of Political Sabotage. “Though Kate Brown has spent her years in office winnowing down the number of death row inmates from 34 to 17 and releasing violent murderers and rapists from prison, she chose this week to abolish the death penalty entirely in Oregon and ‘dismantle’ a death chamber in Oregon that hasn’t been used in decades. And here’s why: she’s bugging out of office in mere days and handing over this time bomb to the newest woke governor to deal with. She did all of it without the consent of Oregon voters.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: John Podesta Made a Fortune Consulting for Green Energy Billionaires. He Now Oversees a Federal Fund That Could Make Them Rich.

RAND PAUL CALLS ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICANS OUT FOR SUPPORTING DISASTROUS BUDGET BILL.

YOU DON’T SAY: The Fed could be facing a nightmare scenario. “There is a much more worrisome scenario, however, in which US inflation remains stubbornly high, perhaps because the combination of continued tight labor markets and elevated living costs fuel persistent rapid wage growth. Such a wage-price spiral would pose a difficult conflict between the policy needs of the US economy and those of the rest of the world. Further increases in interest rates would be essential to bring down US inflation and inflation expectations. But at a time when many of our trading partners were mired in recession, further policy tightening could create grave problems abroad: substantial job losses, widespread defaults and disruptions in international financial markets.”

Left unsaid: The federal government can’t afford prolonged tightening because of increased interest payments on $31 or so trillion in debt.

THEY STOPPED PUSHING THAT LINE AWFULLY SUDDENLY: Son of Paul Pelosi Attacker Just Torched the Media’s Narrative About the Assault.

It seems forever since David DePape hammered Paul Pelosi in one of the most bizarre home invasions ever to occur on American soil. The attack unfolded in late October. DePape broke into the home, though there is no evidence of forced entry. The police body cameras are not being released, nor is the footage collected by the Pelosi residence security cameras. DePape, who wore nothing but underwear, just waltzed into the home armed with hammers and attacked Mr. Pelosi, who was also able to abscond to the bathroom to make an emergency call, describing DePape as a “friend.” Also, Mr. Pelosi was the one who let officers in before DePape reportedly hit him on the head with a hammer, which required brain surgery.The liberal media was off to the races, seeing QAnon postings from DePape and trying to make the right-wing lunatic narrative come alive, but it quickly died on the vine. For starters, DePape is an illegal alien who suffers from mental illness—he tried to buy a birdhouse for a fairy he was in contact with daily. He had rantings about the 2020 election, so you can see how the media was hoping this guy was a conservative. He isn’t based on the paraphernalia at his alleged home, which was decorated with ANTIFA, BLM, and gay pride flags. Over at PJ Media, DePape’s son described his father as a progressive and Green Party supporter. . . .

A Green Party progressive, who supports BLM and Antifa, is also a right-wing lunatic influenced by too many GOP ads attacking Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, which led to the home invasion. Can you see how the liberal media’s narrative quickly evaporated into the ether? And now his son has delivered the kill shot about this being a conservative-influenced assault. DePape was reportedly asking where Mrs. Pelosi was when he entered the residence. She was safe in Washington, DC.

The assault on Mr. Pelosi was perpetrated by a mentally ill left-wing zealot staying in the United States illegally—an illegal alien progressive nutjob hammered Paul.

California is full of nutjobs.

And only some of them hold office.

VERY MERRY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned

METAL AF: Navy Unleashes Controversy By Naming Next Warship USS Fallujah.

LINCOLN BROWN: Is Woke Fatigue Finally Setting In? “For years, from the office of the president of the United States to the local school boards and every office, activist, bureaucrat, and administrator in between, people have had racism, trans, and every other phobia and ‘ism’ pounded into them at every juncture. People who have known they are not racist are tired of defending themselves every minute, except perhaps when it comes to their children. And they also know that discussion is simply impossible. And even the true believers may be growing weary of confessing their sins with every other breath.”

GIVE THE GIFT OF ANTI-COMMUNISM:  I was thinking about my 7^th teacher today.  God bless Mrs. Naoma O’Neill.  One day out of the blue she insisted that I read Animal Farm.  I thought it sounded like a children’s book, so I was a bit skeptical.  But she was adamant that this was the right book for me.  If there is a 7^th grader in your life, maybe it’s time for Animal Farm.  And following up with The Black Book of Communism wouldn’t be a bad idea.  I have a feeling there aren’t many Mrs. O’Neills teaching in the public schools anymore.  You might need to fill in for them.

GREEN IS A JEALOUS DEITY:  Green Germany Haemorrhaging €1.5 Billion per DAY to Keep the Lights On.

IT’S EVERYWHERE:  Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative students and pro-speech law firm slandered and threatened at University of Kansas.

THE ADMINISTRATION IS WORKING TO FRAME THIS AS “AMERICANS PURSUING DEEPER SPIRITUALITY, ESCHEWING MATERIALISM THIS CHRISTMAS”:  Retail sales drop sharply at start of key holiday shopping season.

NO QUESTIONS. RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE:  Questions Arise About How Disgraced ‘Non-Binary’ Biden Official Received Top Clearance.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  American Cities Using Federal COVID Relief Funds for Guaranteed Income Projects.

I’M SEEING THE SAME IN THE US:  ZDF reportage on “working poor” in Germany.