Archive for 2025

December 18, 2025

MARK JUDGE: The Most Explosive Book of 2026.

Yes, they waged war on us.

That’s the simplest way to summarize what the government, technocratic elite, security state, and media did to the American people in 2016. It’s also the premise behind what is sure to be the most important and explosive book of 2026. That book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel, explores the ways the crazed reactions of these parts of society to the arrival of Donald Trump drove them to label him “a threat to American democracy” and take actions that, ironically, turned them into the very threat they tried to warn us against.

Worse, that justification for their actions turned this elite class not just against Trump but against the people who supported him. Trump’s rise, Siegel, writes,

“meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy. With Russian active measures having supposedly penetrated the Internet, anything said online could be attributed to Moscow.”

The great value of The Information State is how well it is organized, brilliantly it is written, and carefully it marshals the evidence that makes its case. There were agencies, within agencies, within agencies who were involved in spying, censorship, peddling false stories, and attempting to ruin lives. The media was essential to the effort and is unlikely, ever, to regain the public trust. Yet behind these Byzantine departments erected to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation”—that last just meaning any opinion with which our elites disagreed—there is one simple truth: With the arrival of Trump, America’s elite institutions waged war against their own people.

And never forget this part: “That madness began with people like John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, and President Barack Obama.”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green on Dec 18th, 2025

ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING:

I asked Grok to look at the record number of launches set each year by company, going back to 2005. Here are the results:

2005–2017: No single entity exceeded ~30 launches in a year. Russian state launches (via Roscosmos/RKK Energia) peaked around 25–30 in some years, but no major records were set in this timeframe compared to later surges.

2018: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) – ~39 launches. China set a new modern-era high for a single organization, surpassing previous annual totals by any entity in the post-Cold War period.

2023: SpaceX – 98 launches (96 Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy missions)
SpaceX more than doubled China’s mark, largely due to Starlink deployments and reusable Falcon 9 technology.

2024: SpaceX – ~134 launches (132–134 Falcon family missions)
SpaceX broke its own record again, with the Falcon 9 fleet alone achieving a Guinness-recognized high for a single rocket model.

2025 (as of December 18): SpaceX – 165 launches. SpaceX already set a new annual record mid-year, continuing the trend of rapid cadence growth. No other company (e.g., CASC in China, ~50–60 launches/year recently) comes close.

It really is SpaceX versus the world.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green on Dec 18th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

The (very) lengthy tweet concludes with a reference to the above photo

I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.

***

My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting?” Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025

PEOPLE LOSE FAITH IN THE LAW WHEN IT ISN’T ENFORCED:

So let’s restore bigly faith in the law.

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green on Dec 18th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM BLUE COLORADO: Expect a special interest stampede if ‘progressive’ tax passes.

You can predict some of the damage from Initiative 181 just by reading its miserably-written text:

It would amend the state constitution to strip away the protection of the single flat rate.

With constitutional protection gone, it would re-write the tax code to make it more complicated, replacing the single bracket with ten new ones—five for individuals and five for corporations.

The individual income tax brackets would range from 4.21% to 9.51%—far above that of any other state in the region and one of the steepest in the entire country. Moreover, there does not seem to be any protection from “bracket creep,” the insidious process whereby people’s tax rates rise relentlessly merely because they have kept up with inflation. Year after year, you would find yourself paying more and more of your income to the state.

On the corporate side, Initiative 181 would jack up the marginal rate to 9.51%, the nation’s third highest. This is higher than corporate taxes in lefty states such as New York, Massachusetts, and California. What’s more, this burden would be imposed on even relatively small corporations—those earning more than $1 million a year.

Initiative 181 would abolish your TABOR [Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights] tax refunds for any additional money generated.

It would send the extra funds to various social programs, most of which have a record of waste and corruption. Not a single dime would be spent to counter Colorado’s crime wave, retire our excessive debt, or repair our crumbling roads!

But there’s more than the text of this measure reveals. As I pointed out in a previous column, punitive (“progressive”) state income taxes have a documented record of discouraging investment and killing jobs. This is particularly so when a state hikes levies while other states are cutting them, as is happening now.

Colorado Democrats hate TABOR and have been chipping away at it for years, because the 1992 constitutional amendment limits state and local government revenue growth to inflation plus population increases, requires voter approval for tax hikes or debt, and mandates refunds of any excess revenue to taxpayers.

181 would gut the last obstacle separating Democrats and the total Californication of a once-great state.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green on Dec 18th, 2025

AT MONTANA STATE, FAKE THREATS TO BOLSTER A FAKE RACISM CLAIM: 18-Month Sentence for Anti-Asian/Anti-Gay Threats Sent by Montana State Univ. Chinese Culture Club President. “Lin cynically exploited these fabricated threats as campaign material for her student senate race. Together, she and Defendant Wu orchestrated campuswide propaganda condemning MSU’s alleged indifference to ‘students of color’—all built on their manufactured crisis.”

At this point, i pretty much assume that anything like this is fake until proven otherwise.

Posted at 10:39 am by Glenn Reynolds on Dec 18th, 2025

BEN DOMENECH: Trump’s chief of staff can’t sway a media that revels in Republican ridicule.

Oops, they did it again.

The White House decision to cooperate with Vanity Fair, giving the magazine exclusive access to top Trump administration figures, is one more example of what happens when you let the legacy media pretend that this time, it’s changed.

That its editors won’t screw you over, its reporters won’t put the worst possible spin on your remarks, its photographers won’t dream of using Photoshop to highlight your every blemish for social-media snipers to spread far and wide.

Why, oh why, does every Republican administration fall in love with the idea of trying to win over the people who hate them?

Beware of writers who act like you’re a friend.

Unless I’ve bailed you out and didn’t write about it, I assure you, we are not.

It’s been quite a week. An administration that took Hillary’s late 2016 mantra of “fake news” and made it their favorite catchphrase has to know that Vanity Fair is incapable of writing anything but a hit piece about a Republican president’s team. The Vanity Fair debacle, coupled with Trump’s angry wordblast about Rob Reiner and Dan Bongino announcing he’s leaving the FBI, as Trump joked(?), to go back to his talk show, is creating a strong impression of an administration ending the year in utter turmoil.

In a 2010 article headlined, “Obama’s Hell of a Ride,” John Podhoretz wrote:

Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit. I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”

This week’s events don’t bode well for next November. As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “The midterm elections were destined to be tough, given the hysteria into which the Democratic base has whipped itself. But if the midterms turn into a rout, as seems entirely possible, it will be because the administration’s inept public relations efforts constantly help the Democrats to distract the public from the administration’s signal achievements.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Dec 18th, 2025
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