IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Three Rob Reiners.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 18, 2025
IT ISN’T THAT HARD: Studying the humanities is hard, and that’s a good thing.
As attention spans dwindle, even among students at elite schools, humanities departments are struggling to attract students, he writes. Many colleges are trying to persuade students the humanities are “relevant” and “practical.”
That’s not going to work, writes Williams, who teaches about books and ideas at Bard. “For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.”
He’ll teach two spring seminars this year, one on Albert Camus and his influences, the other on the idea of the American dream through Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. His “bright, self-selecting” students say they’re “eager they are to immerse themselves in the texts,” he writes. But their zeal doesn’t last when they realize that close reading is difficult. “By the end of the semester, only a fraction seem to have gotten through the texts and writing assignments without outsourcing at least some of their work to AI.”
Humanities instruction — at least without lefty deconstruction — largely fell by the wayside long before AI. Probably because teaching the humanities leads to a deep appreciation for Western culture.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. That ‘Superflu?’ It’s the Flu, Nothing More.
Don’t get me wrong. The Influenza virus is no small thing.
Well, yes, it is, but you know what I mean. It can be very dangerous for many people, and even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital, it is one of the most miserable experiences to get the flu. I am pretty much a hermit these days, spending all my time spewing out words onto a computer screen, but even I know that getting the flu really sucks.
But it has always sucked, and this strain of influenza is, so far, not causing more hospitalizations per case, but is instead a bit more common than in many years because they blew it when formulating the vaccine, and even when they get it right, the flu vaccine is not especially effective compared to most. Respiratory viruses are much harder to vaccinate against than something like smallpox.
Still, people are being bombarded with stories about the “superflu” that is sending droves of people to the hospital. Newsflash, folks: hundreds of thousands of people a year are hospitalized by the flu every year in the US, because the flu is awful and dangerous if you are especially vulnerable. And as the population ages, it will get even more so.
I gave up on flu shots years ago because the results were just too hit and miss to bother with them, and I’m not in any risk groups.
But I have since added l-lysine and zinc to my supplements during flu season, along with doubling up on the vitamin C.
Knock on wood, I haven’t the flu in years — and just going by personal history, “should” have caught it once or twice by now.
THAT’S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG: Two Fraudsters Trafficked $7 Million in SNAP Funds.
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.”
EXCLUSIVE: Christmas Is Merry in Nazareth Again.
ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING:
Congrats to the entire @SpaceX team for achieving 165 launches🚀 ! While we originally set out for 170, we actually revised the manifest to 165 this summer based on business and manifest needs. We have two more Falcon launches to go in 2025 for extra credit for a total of 1-6-7… pic.twitter.com/wCH1O1qmEY
— Kiko Dontchev (@TurkeyBeaver) December 17, 2025
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.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Yippee Ki-Yay: How to Shoot Like John McClane at Your Christmas Party. “If you’d like to defend your estranged wife at your Christmas party and shoot like John McClane, there are options that won’t put you in debt or require a second mortgage.”
PEOPLE LOSE FAITH IN THE LAW WHEN IT ISN’T ENFORCED:
Good!
It’s clearly laid out in federal statute: If you lie during the process of becoming a citizen or subsequently commit a crime, the U.S. is authorized to revoke your citizenship.
And you’ll be shocked at the amount of people in this country that fall in that category… https://t.co/khNE4XU6Pq
— Theo Wold (@RealTheoWold) December 18, 2025
So let’s restore bigly faith in the law.
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.
DAVID MANNEY: Trump’s Pressure Campaign and Maduro’s Fury.
THEY FIGHT: Democrats recruit candidates to run in every 2026 race in Texas.
The party is running 104 candidates to fill every congressional and state legislative seat, along with every statewide judicial and state Board of Education race, the Texas Tribune reported. Strategists speaking with the outlet said the move, which will see Democrats use resources in hopeless races, will have an upstream effect by pushing turnout in areas where top-level candidates usually cannot reach.
“Even the most relentless statewide candidate is never going to talk to every voter that they need to,” Texas Majority PAC Director Katherine Fischer told the outlet. “We need a network of talented, compelling Democratic communicators across the state to clearly communicate the message that Republican leadership has failed us, and that Texans should consider voting differently this cycle and in the future.”
The effort will also force Republicans to stretch their resources across the state.
The GOP should do the same in Dem strongholds, if for no other reason than to show Democrats a living, breathing, non-Nazi Republican to dispel the propaganda.
Longterm, the downstream effects could prove useful.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Hails 2025 Successes, but I’m Just Here for the Trolling. “I mean, I didn’t think that he could top the “official portrait” of the autopen, but Trump never ceases to surprise. The leftmedia hacks have been triggered and it’s beautiful to see. After what they put Trump through during the aforementioned Biden slog, I don’t think he can be too harsh to them. The harshness is all true, of course. His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama and Joe Biden have long been overdue for some honest assessments of their useless presidencies.”
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SELL ME ON IT, I’M ALREADY IN FAVOR: Ilhan Omar claims Trump travel ban is ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane,’ says he has ‘creepy obsession’ with Somalians.
Omar appeared on CNN, where she discussed the travel ban in an interview with Wolf Blitzer and argued that the policy separates families. Groups of Somalians in Minnesota have been discovered to have been engaging in fraud by taking money for to provide government services that they never delivered. In some cases there have been kickbacks to others in the community who allowed those non-profit groups to claim they were providing benefits to those persons.
“The biggest worry of the new executive order is that it does separate families,” she claimed. “It doesn’t create an exception for US citizens to have their family members be able to come visit and celebrate milestones with them, so this is a very cruel, inhumane immigration policy that he is putting in place.”
Here’s another thing she recently said: DHS says Rep. Omar’s son was not pulled over by ICE, despite claims.
WHAT’S GOING ON WITH CHATGPT? This AI Keeps Getting Dumb and Dumber, and I’ve Got the Receipts.
COLD WAR II: Trump and Xi Are Talking — But the U.S. and China Are Headed for an AI Collision.
To understand the rivalry, consider a recent announcement by the U.S. Justice Department: on November 20, it charged two Americans, and two Chinese nationals, with a conspiracy to illegally export about 400 high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) to China. Federal law requires that a license be secured for export of these technologies, which can be used to develop and strengthen AI.
The co-conspirators didn’t have a license – and never even applied for one. In fact, they lied about the destination of the GPUs when shipping them. And for their services, they received a cool $3.89 million in wire transfers from China.
The backdrop to this smuggling scheme is Beijing having set a goal for China to be the world’s leader in AI by 2030. And it’s made considerable headway. “China is the global leader in AI research publications and is neck and neck with the United States on generative AI,” points out the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. It adds that China is “advancing rapidly in AI research and application, challenging the United States’ dominance in this critical field.”
Exit quote: “China is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy. And it’s using AI, says the Justice Department, to bolster its military, to test weapons of mass destruction, and to heighten surveillance.”
TREATING CANCER WITH A BAND-AID: Extending Obamacare Subsidies Won’t Fix a Broken System.
December 17, 2025
THAT’S A TOTAL OF 18 MONTHS: UK Imprisons Man for 17 Days — for Each X View of His ‘Hate’ Speech.
WE HAVE AN ASTRONAUT-ENTREPRENEUR IN CHARGE OF NASA:
BREAKING: The U.S. Senate has just officially confirmed Jared Isaacman as the new head of NASA. At just 42 years old, he now becomes the youngest person in history to lead the agency.
Congrats @rookisaacman! To the Moon and Mars!🚀 pic.twitter.com/xmcPCHc1zU
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 17, 2025