THE HEADLINE NUMBERS NEVER TELL THE WHOLE STORY:

The BLS says we lost 41,000 jobs in 2 months.

But control for Federal layoffs and we gained 121,000.

Control for deportations and we gained 300,000.

The “Weak” job numbers are entirely made of Federal layoffs and millions of illegals going home. pic.twitter.com/b6GUCRdyPL

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) December 19, 2025

There’s a shift from government employment to private sector employment, and from employing illegals to employing citizens.

So much winning.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: FINALLY — Rogue Judge Held Accountable for Being a Scofflaw Idiot. “Her Honor was found guilty yesterday of felony obstruction, providing a little hope that all is not lost when it comes to the American judicial system.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO GOODER AND HARDER? DOE orders WA coal plant to continue operating despite state ban.

The state’s last coal plant was scheduled to close at the end of this year and Puget Sound Energy, which had bought coal-fired electricity from the plant, had agreed to convert the plant to burn natural gas. The closure had been negotiated between the state, TransAlta and climate and energy advocates in an agreement first reached in 2011.

The order, which mirrors other efforts by the Department of Energy at other soon-to-retire coal plants across the country, sets the state and federal government up for a political fight, said Lauren McCloy, a utility and regulatory director of the NW Energy Coalition.

All Washington state utilities are required to stop using coal-fired electricity after this year, under the state’s Clean Energy Transformation Act. The landmark climate law also calls for utilities to become greenhouse gas “neutral” by 2030 and have emission-free electricity by 2045 or risk steep fines.

More:

The federal order cites a report commissioned by the region’s largest utilities that has said the risk of rolling blackouts during extreme weather events like cold snaps and heat waves due to insufficient power generation is increasing across the Northwest.

In short, the Trump administration probably just saved Washington state residents from unnecessary rolling blackouts.

But maybe they shouldn’t have.

WE NEED A TOTAL AND COMPLETE SHUTDOWN OF AUSTRALIA UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT WHAT’S GOING ON:

"Monsters": This is how the West views white males at the moment. Are parents of young white boys prepping them for a society that's positioned against them? Are they aware? White parents, how are you prepping your son for this future for him? Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/pzHaGIWXdJ

— Anthony Bradley (@drantbradley) December 18, 2025

I don’t think that kid will grow up to be the problem, mate.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

That feeling of betrayal is not confined to millennials. I'm a late Boomer, born in 1957. I feel betrayed too.

I earnestly supported all the "equality" causes of the 1960s and 1970s. My reward was to gradually discover beginning in the 1980s that they'd been skinsuited by… https://t.co/to5O1noD07

— Eric S. Raymond (@esrtweet) December 19, 2025

ICYMI, IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Three Rob Reiners.

THAT THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS JUST HAPPENED AGAIN: Fulton County: ‘We Don’t Dispute’ 315,000 Votes Lacking Poll Workers’ Signatures Were Counted In 2020.

Ann Brumbaugh, attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, told the SEB in the hearing that while she has “not seen the tapes” herself, the county does “not dispute that the tapes were not signed.” Brumbaugh continued, “It was a violation of the rule. We, since 2020, again, we have new leadership and a new building and a new board and a new standard operating procedures. And since then the training has been enhanced. … But … we don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.”

Georgia’s Secretary of State Office investigated the alleged failure to sign tabluation tapes and “substantiated” the findings that Fulton County “violated Official Election Record Document Processes when it was discovered that thirty-six (36) out of thirty-seven (37) Advanced Voting Precincts in Fulton County, Georgia failed to sign the Tabulation Tapes as required [by statute],” according to a 2024 investigation summary. In addition to probing the unsigned tabulation tapes, the investigation also found that officials at 32 polling sites failed to verify their zero tapes.

Georgia law requires that election officials have each ballot scanner print three closing tapes at the end of each voting day. Poll workers must sign these tapes or include a documented reason for refusal. Voting laws also require poll workers to begin each day of voting by printing and signing a “zero tape” showing that voting machines are starting at zero votes.

If there is no record of whether the tabulator was set at zero at the start of polling, there is no way of telling whether ballots from a previous election (or ballots from a test run) were left on the memory card and might later be counted.

Who supervises the test runs?

EXCUSE ME, DID YOU SAY NETFLIX DID THAT? Netflix ‘Boots’ Gay Military Series After Just a Single Season.

SHUT UP, THEY EXPLAINED: : The Orwellian Excuse the Congressional Black Caucus Gave for Trying to Block My Congressional Testimony.

When the Congressional Black Caucus and 260 left-leaning organizations sent letters trying to prevent me from testifying before Congress, they claimed to be opposing efforts to “undermine civil institutions” and to prevent the use of “government power to silence people.”

This is deeply ironic because the House Judiciary Committee had invited me to testify on how the Southern Poverty Law Center, which demonizes conservatives and Christians in an effort to silence their opinions, influenced the Biden administration, leading to government attacks on nonprofits, such as the notorious FBI memo targeting “radical-traditional Catholics.”

I testified alongside leaders of organizations that had been targeted for violence after the SPLC put them on a “hate map” with Ku Klux Klan chapters. The hearing, “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy,” focused on a key aspect of my writing and reporting, work that has distinguished me as an expert on the SPLC’s tactics.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: The Three Rob Reiners.

PUSHBACK: Maduro Responds to Trump: the Venezuelan Navy Will Escort Oil Tankers.

NICE: Inflation Drops ‘Unexpectedly’ to 2.7% for November. Media Hardest Hit.

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.

JAMIE K. WILSON: DEI and the Death of Excellence: How Ideological Selection Degrades Culture Over Time.

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.

BREAKING: Plane Belonging to NASCAR Star Crashes in North Carolina

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.

YES: The Economic Comeback Under Trump Is Very Real.

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.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Australians Arrest More Bondi ‘Violent Plotters,’ Looks Like Another Islamist Cell.

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.